


Baby (Quinn 1964)

by fabfemmeboy



Series: Immutability and Other Sins [9]
Category: Glee
Genre: Gen, references to Noah Puckerman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-16
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2019-02-15 14:55:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 28,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13033542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fabfemmeboy/pseuds/fabfemmeboy
Summary: Sometimes the hardest thing to do is forge a new path.





	1. Chapter 1

Night had long since fallen by the time she pulled into the apartment complex. The car was new, plush, comfortable, but she hated it. She hated the way her father grinned proudly at her when he presented her with the keys - her graduation present - as though he had ever endorsed the idea enough to be proud of her. She hated the way her mother leaned to kiss her cheek and whispered in a tone that suggested conspiracy, "Even if it will be hard to find a boy with a nicer car than yours now, Quinny." She hated the way the shiny light blue Dodge gleamed too brightly in the sunlight in the parking lot at work and the way the other secretaries looked at her sideways, always wondering which fancy boss must be buying it for her. She didn't have a wedding ring but she had nice gifts which had to mean one of two things: a rich family or a rich secret lover, and the girls at work...well, they always liked the salacious rumours more than the truth.   
  
Mostly she hated that, no matter what she did, the car would always feel like an unspoken bargaining chip. It wasn't a reward for doing well for herself or a sign of any actual pride on her parents' part. It wasn't a statement that they had been wrong about the importance of going to college, of getting her degree, of learning something, of dreaming of anything - no, they maintained that they knew best even as she walked across that stage to accept the diploma they never thought she needed. It didn't say "We're proud of you, honey", it said "See? We knew we were right. Would you have any of this if we hadn't done what we did? We told you we were protecting you, so you can resent us all you like, but this shiny new car tells us who knew best."  
  
On one level, she wasn't sure she could disagree with them. If she'd done what Finn and his family wanted, what was expected of her, she was sure she would be in a rundown house the Hummels would have bought them as a hasty wedding present, staying home with probably two children under the age of four by now, maybe pregnant with a third...she shuddered at the thought as she stepped gracefully out of the vehicle, heels clacking on the asphalt as she walked toward the entrance. But on another level...she refused to give them the satisfaction of thinking she owed them somehow. She didn't. They didn't do it for  _her_ , anyway, they did it for themselves - for their own good name. They did it because no one gave invitations to the parents of the girl in trouble, and if her parents couldn't live without one thing it was a cocktail party.  
  
Oh well. What was done was done. And in the end, it had worked out in her favour anyway, hadn't it? After all, she did have her degree. And a job - not the job she wanted, admittedly, but a job nonetheless which was more than she could ever say for her mother or sister. And a place of her very own, even if it was smaller than she'd expected for how much she could afford. And her pride - she didn't know that she would ever quite give that up, no matter how hard her family tried to shake it from her. The apartment had been a perfect example. Her mom kept saying everything was too small and not good enough for her baby, her dad kept announcing in a voice loudly enough for the complex manager to be unable to miss that he could afford much better than this for his little girl, trying to persuade her with promises of the beautiful apartments he could supply her with until this silly foray into the workforce was over and she settled down with a proper husband who could take care of her. She couldn't think of anything she wanted  _less_  - the inherent unreliability of men wasn't going to be what insured her home.   
  
Besides. If Radcliffe had taught her anything, it was that there were plenty of women who could take care of themselves, and she intended to be one of them. Even if most of her classmates had spent their four years getting an MRS degree, flirting with Harvard boys at mixers, going to the Yard to watch future leaders of politics and industry, styling themselves as a younger Jackie because the President's tragic death didn't mean that another president wouldn't be a Harvard boy and they were intent on finding him...Quinn hadn't. She took more classes with boys than not, but had restrained herself and dated only a few of them and only very briefly. After the year she'd had in Lima...  
  
...Who needed another boy around, anyway?  
  
It wasn't that she didn't like when they looked at her - she could still remember how smug she'd felt when Randall couldn't keep his gaze off her during French class her sophomore year, knowing all the girls in her dorm who wanted to be his girl but seeing the way he only had eyes for her. It was just that after it all, after making so many mistakes, after ruining so much and still feeling ruined even after the problems had been glossed over, she needed things to be about herself and not about the handsome, confident boy two rows away and whizzing through passe compose. She needed to focus on herself and on how to avoid getting into trouble of all sorts.  
  
And she had.  
  
She knew the other girls at work thought she was a snob because she hung her diploma - signed by the presidents of both Radcliffe and Harvard - beside her desk, but she didn't care: she had earned it. Besides, she was used to girls disliking her because she was so much better than they were; it was a role she felt comfortable in.   
  
She pushed open the side door of the complex and ascended two flights of stairs, popping out of the painted block stairwell in the gloomy hallway with its low ceiling. Down three doors on her left was her little corner of the world, the only thing she and she alone could claim ownership of, and she breathed a sigh of relief as she approached. It had been a longer day than usual, draining in its mindlessness while she waited for Larry in Features to finish writing his story so she could take the entire thing down to paste-up, because for some reason he was incapable of walking the page down the hall himself. Or, more accurately, he was incapable of typing his own scribbles into a readable page, and because his own secretary hated him and spent most of her day angling for a better job, it fell to  _her_  to try to put his illegible thought fragments into something usable three hours after she was supposed to be home already. She smiled to herself as she stuck her key into the lock, ready to heat up a tv dinner and take a long, hot bath before retiring to bed with the knowledge she would have to do it all again tomorrow-  
  
Quinn frowned as she turned the key to unlock the door and felt it give easily, indicating that it wasn't locked at all. Had she forgotten this morning? She doubted it; years of living in idyllic suburbs and a campus with guards and monitors posted at each dorm to ensure no boys tried to sleep where they shouldn't had left her with an uneasy feeling about anywhere that didn't measure up to the type of security to which she'd become accustomed. She always locked the door, even fastening the deadbolt behind herself when she retired for the night. There hadn't been any problems in the area, but it made her feel safer. She certainly made sure that the lock and deadbolt were both secure before she left in the morning, which meant-  
  
She pushed open the door, stepping back as if to give herself a moment to see inside before she ventured further. The lights were on, but she could see the corner of the radio from where she stood, untouched, certainly not stolen. "Hello?" she called, clutching her purse strap tightly as she stepped slowly into the kitchen, wondering if she could make it to the silverware drawer in time to grab a knife if anyone really were determined to hurt her-  
  
"About time you got home." Her sister's voice was teasing but held enough disapproval that Quinn knew exactly how she really felt about being made to wait. Even so, it was a relief to hear Katie and not a murderer. Not that she knew any or had even heard of anyone being murdered, except one of her teachers talking about the Black Dahlia, with whom she had apparently been acquainted before the poor girl made the decision to move out to Los Angeles. But Columbus hardly held a wealth of serial killers.  
  
"What are you doing here?" she asked, anger and frustration creeping into her tone. Now that she wasn't afraid for her life, she could be irritated that her obnoxiously perfect sister had stepped into the place that was meant to be free from everything she represented - the ideal blond family, high school sweethearts wed in a flawless ceremony at the stroke of Katie's twentieth birthday, now with three- well, two- no,  _three_  children. It was no secret who the favourite daughter in the family was, not for the past five years, not since her train to a similarly perfect family was derailed pretty spectacularly.  
  
"Waiting for you. You know, I should have been home to cook dinner hours ago. But I guess life in the big city doesn't allow for that, does it?" That Katie tried to pass off her annoyance as something vaguely resembling concern didn't make Quinn any less annoyed, but it let her know pretty clearly this was one of those times she couldn't show it.  
  
Her family had rules that governed all their conversations, and the first and most important was that you didn't show anything. You didn't talk about anything. You didn't do anything or say anything or hint at anything that might make people feel uncomfortable or bad - at least, not overtly. You could shame them all you wanted as long as it wasn't direct, as long as it was just enough that the person thought they'd come to that emotion on their own. Growing up, she had thought everyone was like that; everyone either naturally was, or they behaved that way because she was company - like Finn's family - but when she got to college and saw girls talking, crying on one another's shoulders, openly talking about what bothered them-  
  
It was culture shock, but in a good way. Like a fresh breath of air after being trapped in a basement for years. Being stuffed back down the metaphorical stairs to her sister's world of pasted-on smiles and pretending that any self-doubt or annoyance came only from Quinn herself felt awful. But she knew how to play along.  
  
"I was trying to finish something important," she lied, trying to force a smile, but her tone still came out more irritated than anything. "Why are you here?"  
  
"Look, Quinn..." Katie glanced over her shoulder, and it was only then that Quinn realized they weren't alone. If her sister were one of the people she least wanted to talk to right now, the girl on the couch ranked at the very top of that list.  
  
She was four now. Quinn was ashamed to realize she needed to count the years in her head, to figure out if she'd finished college now just what that meant for the girl with the scuffed-up shoes. It wasn't that she ever  _stopped_  thinking about her, it was just kind of a blur of ache and regret with sporadic wrenching visits at Christmas, Easter, and dinners over the summer. Birthdays always came during finals, which she had always pretended to hate but secretly felt grateful for because she had no idea how she could have watched her little girl blow out candles, standing there and remembering what it felt like to have her inside of her for nine months, and then watched as she turned to Katie and called her-  
  
It had sounded like the best idea at the time. Not that anyone asked her. Not that anyone asked if she could stomach the thought of her daughter calling her "Aunt Quinn" for her entire life. Not that her parents even asked her if she was okay. Her mother came bustling into the hospital room talking about getting her hair cut because it had been so long and their hairdresser back home was asking about her and the nuns said her schoolwork was done for the year already anyway so she might as well just come home and spend the summer getting ready for college. She had looked right at her, tucked her hair behind her ear and cupped her cheek as she said, "Let's let Katie worry about this one, hm?"  
  
And that was that.  
  
Quinn looked around for signs of her other niece and nephew - her  _real_  niece and nephew - but found none. The apartment was silent as she waited for Katie to offer an explanation, before she finally asked, "Why did you bring her here?"  
  
"Quinny..." Katie was the only person other than their mother who called her that, but Quinn hated it just as much from her sister as she did from anyone. "I know we talked about this, and you know I was happy to do my part. Family is family, after all, and of course  _you_  didn't know what you were doing. But this isn't going to work out."  
  
"What do you-"  
  
Katie glanced over her shoulder again to be sure they weren't being eavesdropped-on, then said in a quiet, even voice, "Look at her." The response didn't make any sense, but Quinn did as her sister instructed, able to see easily over Katie's shoulder thanks to her own heels. Her sister had always been taller than her and seemed so much more than the few inches of actual height difference - she carried herself with their mother's regalness and wore her hair swept up off her long neck.   
  
Beth sat awkwardly in the middle of the couch, legs swinging where they couldn't reach the floor. She looked around the apartment with big, dark eyes, like she was trying to figure out if there was something she was meant to be doing, mouth pursed a little. Her knees weren't crossed neatly, and she seemed to be compensating with the way her hands clasped and rested heavily near her lap as though holding her skirt down. Her blue dress was tinged with green and brown, unable to come clean of grass stains, no matter how hard the fabric was scrubbed, and her tights were ripped in several places. Her thick black hair stuck out at all angles from the braid Katie had plaited down her back that morning and frizzed out around her face in a dark halo.  
  
"It was okay when she was younger and her hair was so fine and blonde, but the older she gets the darker and thicker it gets - it lasts five minutes when I style it in the morning, then she's off running and jumping out of some tree somewhere. I swear, I don't know what that girl does to herself, one minute she's the picture of a young lady and the next- She gets it from  _you_ , of course, all that jumping around you used to do." What cheerleading had to do with climbing trees, Quinn had no idea, but Katie continued before she could think too much about it. "She doesn't fit in. She's just so... _different_. She doesn't look-"  
  
It took Quinn's thoughts a moment to catch up. "What?"  
  
"She doesn't look like the rest of us. People are talking - in our neighbourhood, our church? Asking each other what I did and with whom. No one would believe Jim's her father, and with good reason. You know how women at church are, once they hear a juicy bit of gossip they can't let it go and now they're saying I slept with-" She caught herself before she said something she might regret, glancing sideways a moment but not all the way back to the bored-looking preschooler. Her voice dropped to a whisper as she added, "I was happy to do you a favour when you needed it, so you could go be a college girl, but I can't do this anymore."  
  
"Can't do what anymore?"  
  
"She's not-...she's not one of us. She's not my problem. I did this to help out because Mom asked me to, because you didn't know  _what_  you were doing and had no idea how to take care of yourself, let alone anyone else. Because you had  _dreams_ -" The way she said the word made Quinn even more uncomfortable, the implication that dreams were such a silly, childish notion that had no place in an adult's world. Not like book clubs or tea meetings or play date circles where the women sat around all afternoon and ignored the children playing in the back yard, drinking away their unhappy marriages with the girls.  _That_  was, to her sister's mind, the real world.  
  
Quinn felt ashamed to think about how immersed in it she'd been once. How crucially important something silly like a debutant ball or Homecoming had seemed to her back then. Back before she knew what it felt like to have everything she wanted suddenly crumble around her, to have everyone she thought cared about her turn their back or not care that she vanished. And now, working at the paper, seeing what real problems there were in the world, how other people lived with practically nothing...  
  
The things that she wanted felt less and less far-fetched every day. Her sister might not understand that, and she knew her parents didn't.  
  
"-but you're done with that now. You're an adult, and it's time for you to take responsibility for the things you've done. You can't just walk away and ignore your mistakes."  
  
"Mistakes?" she asked, her voice low and cold. As though Katie had never made one. As though a person could  _be_  one. Just because Beth wasn't something she could have in her life didn't make her something Quinn would take back if she could. That sounded so callous, downright cruel. "You're talking about your  _daughter_ ," she added pointedly.  
  
"No," Katie replied sharply. "I'm talking about  _your_  daughter. So." And just like that, with a fake, bright smile and a clap of her hands, Katie began to list off her preparations. "I brought her current clothes, plus the next size of hand-me-downs from Eleanor - Beth grows like a weed and rips things so quickly, she won't wear anything that fits right it always has to be big on her or she says it's too constricting to climb in." She had her 'I don't know where that girl gets it' tone again, the one that made Quinn's eyes narrow and jaw tighten at her sister's condescension, but she didn't seem to notice as she kept prattling on like this was any other conversation. "I told her to bring her toys, but I don't think she packed much - her loss. I'll send more over if I find them, but I don't really have time to sort through that playroom and look for anything she might want. She's picky about food but will eat anything if forced - or if dessert is on the line. She's not in school yet so don't worry about that until next year..."  
  
Quinn wasn't sure at what point it finally dawned on her what Katie was doing here. The suitcase beside Beth, the talk about food and school and it being time for Quinn to step up and take responsibility for herself and her- her  _actions_  (she refused to even think 'mistakes')... Katie was leaving her here. She had brought the girl with no warning, no time to prepare, and was going back home tonight to her husband and two children in the suburbs.   
  
Her eyes widened and she cut her sister off in the middle of a one-sided discussion about what children Beth should be kept away from (all boys, apparently). "Do Mom and Dad know about this?" She could call them - her mother, at least...because her mother thought it was crazy to even consider raising a child on her own like this. And right now, as much as she hated most things her mother believed and stood for, she was inclined to agree. What was she going to do with Beth tomorrow when she had to go to work? What did she know about taking care of a 4-year-old?   
  
Besides, she had closed the door on this part of her life for a reason. Even being in the same room as Beth was painful, and as much as she might have hated the idea of her daughter calling her 'Aunt Quinn' her entire life, the idea of trying to suddenly inject the girl into her world was too jarring to seriously contemplate. She hadn't wanted  _this_ , certainly not now that she had her degree and a job and a life-  
  
Katie stared at her. "Of course they do. They agree that I'm doing the right thing."  
  
On some level, Quinn knew it shouldn't have surprised her. She could imagine how that conversation had gone, too - Katie starting with the statement that Beth didn't fit in, dancing around the issue until finally it was decreed by her father that it was about time Quinn live up to her role in society and stop fiddling around with all this workplace nonsense. It was the way everything worked in their family. But on another level, it seemed so cold and inhumane - ripping a girl away from who she thought her mother was and putting her with someone else who had no time or capacity to care for her?   
  
Because she didn't. She knew that. She was getting home at 9 on a weeknight and that wasn't unusual. When she was 17, she might have been naive enough to think that this was a possibility, but not anymore. Not at 22, when she knew better and could see what happened to the girls in the office with families...That wasn't going to be her. She had gone to college and gotten a job and wasn't about to split her time between work and family, or move out to the suburbs and find a nice man to look after them like some girls would. She had a life she enjoyed and this-  
  
This was not part of her plan. Not at all.  
  
Katie finally wrapped up everything she thought might be relevant to the care of a girl Quinn had met maybe a handful of times, concluding with the statement, "But you'll be fine, right? After all, you're a modern woman - you think you can do anything." While Quinn was still trying to figure out exactly what she could even say to that, Katie turned and walked over to the couch, leaning down to kiss Beth's forehead.  
  
"Mommy, where are you going?"  
  
"Uh-uh-uh," Katie chided with a click of her tongue and a shake of her head. "Remember what I told you? Aunt Quinn is your Mommy. She'll take care of you now."  
  
"But why?"  
  
"Because that's the way it's supposed to be." Katie smoothed back Beth's hair with a roll of her eyes followed by a glare of frustration at the unruly locks, then pulled back, produced a tissue from her purse and wiped her hands, then strode back through the living room and kitchen toward the door. "Behave for her - better than you did for me."  
  
Quinn wanted to say something, to stop her somehow, but she felt at once frozen and resigned. She didn't know what she could try to do or say, but at this point she was sure of exactly one thing: None of it would do a bit of good. Katie would leave, would drive back to the suburbs where her husband and two - not three, but two - children were waiting for her. She would apologize to them for the inconvenience of a late dinner, then tuck her son and daughter - her  _real_  son and daughter - into their beds without so much as a second thought to the empty bed. Or maybe she would think about Beth for a few moments, smiling to herself as she realized that the inconvenient mistake, the dark mark on their beautiful, perfect blonde family, was no longer her concern. Now no one would ask her questions at church, would ask her what act of indiscretion she'd committed with someone so socially unacceptable.  
  
And those people hadn't even  _met_  Puck. Quinn almost laughed a the image of just how horrified Katie's church friends would be to see the boy who was responsible for Beth, with his thick dark hair and his bad boy sneer. She brought her hand to her mouth, the sound coming out choked and more like a stunned cry than a sound of amusement like she expected. Katie looked in her direction for a moment, then simply pulled open the door and cast one more look at the run-down, tiny apartment before departing, heels clicking rhythmically on the linoleum in the dim hallway.  
  
"Mommy!" The click of the door behind the woman felt just final enough to spark a sense of urgency in the confused little girl, who leapt from the couch and practically hurled herself at the exit, arms reaching out as though if she just waved harder, jumped further, she wouldn't be left behind. "Mommy, come back, you forgot me!"  
  
"Beth-" Quinn's voice broke as she tried to force it louder than the whisper that wanted to come out. "Beth. She didn't forget you." Because Katie hadn't. Oversight would be unforgivable, but this? This was wretched. This was hateful and callous and so twisted that she almost wondered whether Katie had simply pushed her feelings down for so long that she didn't even have them anymore. How else could she just leave the little girl in someone else's kitchen like that?  
  
"But-...she-...and then-"  
  
What was she supposed to say? What exactly was the right thing to tell the crying four-year-old whose mother had walked out on her? What precisely was she supposed to do now? 'Take responsibility' - could a term be more vague and less helpful? What did taking responsibility even mean when it came to a little girl crying on her kitchen floor because her entire world had been yanked away and no longer made sense?  
  
Honesty. That had to come first, right? No pretending that this wasn't happening. She had to- "She didn't forget you. You're staying here with me," she said. It felt foreign on her tongue, but the words came with an odd sense of calm. It was surreal enough to not really believe what she was saying, let alone react to it, and the quasi-denial seemed to work. "You'll sleep on the couch for now. Have you eaten dinner yet?"  
  
"Nuh-" Beth hiccuped as she looked up at Quinn. "Nuh-uh."  
  
With a response like that, it wasn't hard to see how she didn't fit in with Katie, who taught her children "No ma'am" from their first words. Her sister was always complimented for having such polite, well-behaved children... "Why don't you go to the living room and I'll see what I have," she suggested. Beth swallowed hard and took a deep breath, sniffling hard, then stood. The proud jut of her chin was familiar, though Quinn wasn't sure from which side of the family the girl got it, and she walked slowly, stiffly, like she'd been reprimanded for not walking correctly too many times and couldn't move naturally in her own skin, into the living room. The look on her face said so clearly 'You won't catch me crying anymore, I'm not sad' that it almost broke Quinn's heart more to see it. But there were more important matters at hand.  
  
With her job being what it was, and her bosses not generally believing that she should be allowed to leave the office by a particular hour, Quinn tended to do her grocery shopping whenever she got out at a rare decent hour. The system worked well enough most of the time, aside from the odd night where she would arrive home at nearly 8 or 9 to find that she had already eaten the last tv dinner. She knew for sure she had at least one because she had decided last night between the turkey and the salisbury steak, but she couldn't guarantee whether there was a second one in her freezer. Pulling open the door, she breathed an audible sigh of relief to find three slim boxes stacked inside - meatloaf, turkey, and fried chicken. Kids liked meatloaf, right? She pulled it out along with the turkey and popped it into the oven. She was sure it was nothing like what Beth was used to, but it was food and it was the best she could offer until she went to the store tomorrow.  
  
Oh god. Tomorrow.


	2. Chapter 2

Quinn awoke from the strangest dream the next morning. She had arrived home to find her sister there, in her apartment, dressed to the nines, with the daughter she’d given up and all the girl’s clothes and possessions, then prattled on about responsibility for awhile before just leaving the girl with her. As she laid in bed, trying to calm down her racing heart, she could hear something in the living room – the television. Quinn didn’t watch it very often, just the news in the morning and evening usually, and she never left it on before going to bed. The sound of the test pattern after the network signed off drove her too crazy, and she couldn’t sleep with the incessant high-pitched drone. Which meant someone else had turned it on.  
  
…It wasn’t a dream, was it? She realized slowly. She felt cold suddenly, nauseous, panicked – and  _angry_. She had a plan. She had a routine. She was supposed to be waking up in- she glanced at the alarm clock beside the bed – ten minutes, then take a shower, get dressed, fix herself tea and toast for breakfast, drive to work, spend all day chasing after newsmen who thought they had too many things to do to be bothered by her, then come home at some late hour completely exhausted, pop a frozen dinner in the oven or eat a sandwich over the countertop, then sleep soundly until her alarm the next morning. And now, without any warning, without any preparation or help except for a few tips offered snidely by her sister before she drove off, Quinn was supposed to just take care of a whole other person?  
  
She padded into the living room, staring at the little girl who sat Indian-style in front of the television set. The nightshirt she'd slept in was a size too big and hung sloppily off her slim frame, pale white against her arms and messy nest of dark hair. The way she stared up at the set, eyes wide, mouth slightly open in a pose that could either been awe or laziness...Quinn had never spent time watching television with Puck, but it wasn't hard to see the resemblance.  
  
Should she call him? He had gotten her into this mess, shouldn't she make him deal with all of it now that her sister had dropped it on her? She could still do that now, couldn't she? Even though she hadn't told him before she left? She could try. Or she could call Finn; he probably wouldn't be much help, and his stepfather would make them get married, but-  
  
No. Not in a million years. She had not spent four years working to reinvent herself only to be a homemaker in Lima with Finn Hudson. Absolutely not.  
  
Besides. Even if her ex-boyfriend was dumb enough not to see who Beth looked like, everyone else in town would be able to identify the girl's father immediately. Puck had a pretty distinctive look for Lima, and she wasn't about to be their Hester Prynne. She hadn't planned to escape the town in the way she had, but she was more than happy to be gone from their small-town attitudes and gossip mills, and there was absolutely no way she could go back now, not with that dark-haired, dark-eyed girl.  
  
So if she wasn't calling Puck, and she would sooner die than go crawling back to Finn, that meant the men were out of the question. And, of course, since her parents had known about all of this - or so Katie said - she couldn't call them, which meant she was pretty much...completely...on her own.  
  
What in the world was she supposed to do? She could feel the previous night's panic rising again, threatening to choke her. She had no idea what she was doing. There was a girl here who needed someone to take care of her, and  _she_  had a job to get to before 8:45 or her boss would have her head...to say nothing of the other girls in the assistant pool who were constantly gunning for her. She would have thought it was aiming for her job, but several of them worked for better, more powerful, kinder bosses than hers anyway. That meant it was personal - and she  _really_  did not have time to add, well, a personal problem to all those fights.  
  
Unfortunately, didn't have much choice.  
  
"Did you sleep okay?" she asked, almost testing the waters.  
  
"Uh-huh," Beth replied, not tearing her eyes from the screen. "But it's kinda dark."  
  
Quinn had never thought the living room was dark...but then, she'd never spent time there with the lights off, and Beth was little. Kids could be scared of the dark - she didn't remember it herself, but she thought so. "Are you hungry?" she asked. Beth started to nod but shrugged instead, like "yes" might be the wrong answer. "I have..." What did she have? She usually ate two slices of toast on the way to work - sometimes more like warm-bread because her toaster always seemed to be on the fritz. She certainly didn't have cereal or bacon, and she was pretty sure the eggs in the refrigerator were at least a week past their expiration date, but maybe... she hurried into the kitchen and pulled open the cupboard beside the stove, almost sighing in relief as she saw the box of Bisquick. She'd  _thought_  she still had some. "Do you like pancakes?"  
  
 _That_  got Beth's attention. "Yeah!" She turned and hopped to her feet in one quick motion.  
  
Quinn smiled - thank goodness that had worked. "Then how about while I make them, you go get ready?" she asked, voice calmer even as she tried to figure out-  
  
"Ready for what?" Beth asked suspiciously.  
  
It was a good question. it would have been a good question even if Beth hadn't been shoved off to live with essentially a stranger the night before. Unfortunately, Quinn didn't have an answer for her. She had to get to work but couldn't just  _leave_  the girl. Four was too young for that, right? She was pretty sure. Times like this she really wished she'd had time to babysit during high school instead of spending every evening and weekend at cheerleading, though she guessed it didn't help the problem at hand: She didn't know any babysitters in Columbus. She hadn't seen any teenage girls around the apartment building - and even if she had, they would be in school. The only person in her building she'd even said hello to more than a couple times was Mrs. Hubbard, who Quinn doubted would be too helpful.  
  
Helpful or not, she might have to do in a pinch.  
  
"For the day," Quinn replied. "Get dressed, brush your teeth, wash your face. And when you're done, we'll have pancakes." Beth grinned and went to her bag to tug out the necessary supplies. As soon as she had turned the corner into the bathroom, Quinn hurried out of her apartment and down the hall, knocking quickly on the door.  
  
The best part about Mrs. Hubbard was that she looked like another nursery rhyme character entirely. With her craggy face and perpetual wardrobe of a housecoat and slippers, she could easily have been the old woman in the shoe who raised children to the point of having neither food nor patience for them all. Everything about her demeanor gave the distinct sense of being fed up with anything and everything around her: she stood with a slight hunch, shoulders drooping loosely; her voice always sounded as though she were just getting over pneumonia - low and gravely; her gloomy eyes always seemed to be looking past the person she was talking to, lids perpetually at half-mast with disinterest. When she opened the door, her gaze narrowed. "Don't get dressed up on my account," she commented, and it was only then that Quinn remembered she was still in her pajamas. So was Mrs. Hubbard, of course - a quick glance up and down the old woman revealed a boxy pink housecoat over the most hideous floral nightgown Quinn had ever seen, with one backless slipper in a dingy rose colour and the other in light blue - but in the interest of the enormous favour she was about to ask, Quinn held her tongue.  
  
"I hope I didn't wake you."  
  
"You didn't."  
  
"I need to ask for a huge favour." Mrs. Hubbard looked at her expectantly, and Quinn realized she had no idea where to begin. With Katie's visit the night before? With high school? Instead, she started with the most relevant fact. "There's a four year old in my apartment, and I have nowhere to send her while I go to work."  
  
"Where's her mother?"  
  
Quinn tensed. "That's a long story," she replied tightly - one she didn't have the time or energy for, and one she doubted she would be able to explain for the foreseeable future either.  
  
Mrs. Hubbard's gaze turned to something like triumph, though Quinn wasn't sure why, and the old woman smirked a moment before replying dully, "Bring her over. But don't work too late - I don't wanna waste my whole day  _and_  evening."  
  
Quinn held her tongue, biting back the retort of where in the world Mrs. Hubbard might have to go, relieved that the favour had gone as well as it had. "Yes - of course," she replied. "I'll bring her over as soon as we've had breakfast. And thank you." She headed back to her own apartment, glad that she had one less thing to worry about or arrange. The morning was already getting away from her too quickly. She still had to shower, get dressed, do her makeup, make the pancakes-  
  
...and rebrush Beth's hair. The mop still stuck out at all angles, though Quinn had to admit it looked less awkard with the shirt and torn, grass-stained jeans Beth was wearing than it had with the dress the night before. She looked Beth up and down, trying to figure out what she was meant to do, and it was hard not to notice the way Beth shifted awkwardly, biting her lip at the scrutiny. She held her hands locked behind her back, the toe of her sneaker digging into the floor, eyes downcast. Did the fact that Beth looked like she was used to getting yelled at for this mean that Quinn was meant to scold her as well? She didn't have to think too hard to come up with a dozen ways Katie would disapprove of Beth's appearance, and it was obvious the girl knew that but had done it anyway...but frankly, Quinn didn't approve of Katie right now, and it wasn't worth making Beth more upset when there was no point. Who would see her anyway? Old Mother Hubbard in mismatched slippers? She had too many other things to worry about this morning, starting with pancakes.  
  
Quinn didn't understand why everything took so much longer with a child, but by the time she emerged from the bedroom - showered, dressed, and ready to go and only 15 minutes behind schedule much to her surprise and delight - she found Beth only halfway done with her breakfast. Sensing they wouldn't be able to hurry out the door soon, Quinn snagged herself a pancake and buttered it, eyeing Beth as she ate slowly. It wasn't that she dawdled exactly - well, a little, but it wasn't the way the girl dragged the tines of her fork through the syrup on her plate on the way to the next bite that was taking so long...was it? Still, each bite seemed to take  _forever_ : drag the fork; try to rip a bite off using the tines; wrestle with the edge when it doesn't cut properly; finally get a piece separated from the rest and stab it with the fork; lift the fork in an odd, swooping motion to the mouth; chew the bite exactly ten awkward, vertical, closed-mouth chomps; drag the fork across the plate toward the pancake again to start another bite; all while seeming to plot out the motions precisely as though trying to achieve maximum awkwardness at minimal speed.  
  
It was the swooping motion that gave away the reason for the bizarre practiced-looking ritual that Beth seemed to constantly be counting out in her head. Quinn could remember being in a cotillion class at- probably eight, she thought, though it might have been a little earlier in preparation for an upcoming First Communion luncheon. The instructor had demonstrated how to properly sip soup in polite company. Every girl had learned the motions of the arm and wrist and spoon easily, except one - Isabelle Huntsman had never been able to get the hang of it and seemed to constantly look like she was trying to flick the utensil across the room as her arm swooped and jerked above the table. The girls - except for Brittany, who had just stared blankly at the bowl for no reason anyone could guess - had giggled as much as they dared while Isabelle's face had grown more and more frustrated.  
  
Quinn, of course, had learned the motion perfectly in very short order; her father had praised her for her natural grace and poise.  
  
She started cleaning up around Beth the best she could while she waited and finally - at 8:40 - Beth pushed her plate back and stood. Quinn managed not to comment on how long it had taken and patted herself on the back for her restraint. "Okay," she sighed, looking at her watch. "Get your toys and let's go. Maybe if I take back-roads instead of the out-around I can make up the time and be there by- well, 9:15 anyway..." She mused as she put Beth's plate in the sink and splashed enough water on it to hopefully keep the syrup from crusting on in absence of time to wash it properly. She felt a sudden squeeze around her hips and looked down to see Beth clinging to her. Her little arms didn't fit all the way around Quinn's middle, but damned if she wasn't trying; her face was buried against the back of Quinn's dress, just above the waistband, and from the tight hold it certainly felt like Beth didn't plan on going  _anywhere_  anytime soon.  
  
Great. Just what she needed, as late as they already were. She was sure Delores and Bobbi would comment when she walked in so late, and Marcia would definitely make sure Mr. Nichols noticed she wasn't there when he arrived, and the  _last_  thing she was going to be able to do was explain herself. And to top it off, she was going to have to ask someone to cover any late assignments because she had to pick Beth up from the crazy old witch down the hall, and somewhere in all of that she had to find time to stop at the supermarket. All because her- her  _fucking_  sister with her stupid fucking  _perfect_  family had decided to uproot her whole life because she was tired of gossip from the woman who thought that tea parties were the most important part of life.  
  
Frustration rising even further, teeth gritted angrily, she managed to get out, "What is  _wrong_  with-" before Beth looked up at her with wide, dark eyes rimmed with red and tears. She flinched at Quinn's tone, bit her lip, but didn't let go.  
  
Quinn's life wasn't the only one Katie had thrown into chaos last night, she realized. She couldn't come close to understanding why, and at least she was an adult. She could at least understand why in Katie's mind this made some sort of twisted sense. She could remember sitting on a narrow wooden bed, hands on her enormous stomach, knowing Beth was in there. The four year old had none of that. She had just been abandoned by the only mother she had ever known with no explanation. She couldn't hope to make sense of it - let alone to understand that "get your toys and let's go" meant "I have to go to work" and not "I'll never see you again, good luck finding a place to sleep tonight."  
  
Who  _did_  something like that to a child? Who did something like that to a  _person_? Let alone to abandon someone and claim it was what the people at church would approve of? Though, knowing Katie's friends, they would all say she was doing the right thing. Quinn would never understand how those women could do even a fraction of the things that they did and claim superiority in the name of the Lord.  
  
But that question would have to wait.   
  
"I'm just taking you down the hall," she tried to explain in the gentlest voice she could muster - which wasn't easy, as furious as she was with her sister on both their behalf. "I have to go to work."  
  
Beth looked up in confusion. "Why?"  
  
"Because it's already almost 9," she replied, trying not to think about just how late she was going to be.  
  
"But Mommy said you were my mommy now," Beth stated.  
  
Not just now, Quinn thought to herself - always...sort of. "Yes."  
  
"But mommies don't go to work."  
  
Quinn only barely managed not to sigh in frustration. She didn't have time to explain what she'd spent four years studying and swearing to herself, let alone to a four year old. "Some do."  
  
"But why-"  
  
"Because not everyone has a husband around who pays for everything, and some of us want  _more_  from our lives," she muttered under her breath. Beth kept staring up at her, even more confused, and Quinn knelt down in front of her. "I need to go to work. So you're going to stay with Mrs. Hubbard, just down the hall," she stated, boiling down everything to its most simple parts in the hopes that maybe - just maybe - she could explain it enough that the child would let her leave. "And after work, I'll come back to get you, and then we'll have dinner."  
  
Beth looked skeptical and, after a moment, ventured, "You promise?"  
  
She seemed to tiny and scared, standing there beside the kitchen sink, and Quinn had to wonder again how Katie could just walk away like this. How could it not tear her up to go about her day and know her little girl was scared and abandoned and in the hands of someone who had no idea what she was doing?  
  
...Because in Katie's mind, Quinn realized slowly with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, Beth had never been her little girl. She had always been an inconvenience thrust upon her by their parents. A blemish on her perfect blonde family. A mistake her baby sister had made that she got stuck cleaning up after.  
  
"I promise," she replied quietly but more determined than ever to make this work somehow. Beth needed her. And, more importantly, Beth needed her  _mother_.  
  
And now, after all this time...that had to be her.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Quinn swung her car into her parking space, sighing as she saw that she was, without a doubt, the last person to arrive; of course, at 9:27, she would have been stunned if every other space weren't filled already. Considering the girls were meant to be there before their bosses and most of the men arrived sometime around 9...a few came in later, mostly the ones who stayed latest, but the secretaries were entitled to no such shift in their workday. Which meant that she could already guarantee that not only had some people noticed her lateness, but that several of the other girls were probably making sure  _everyone_  noticed.  
  
She grabbed her purse off the passenger seat and hurried toward the office, her heels clicking against the pavement of the parking garage. Maybe, at least, she could be lucky and her boss would also be running late. He did that sometimes, depending on what events he had covered during the week or what sports event he had watched the night before - "for work," though he didn't generally have much to do with getting the sports section ready for circulation. The Reds had played last night, right? She had no idea, if only because their Columbus paper  _really_  had no reason to report on Cincinnatti teams. Besides, if forced to pick a baseball team three hours away to follow, it would be Cleveland anyway. But maybe, just maybe, she could get  _one_  thing going right this morning and arrive to find her boss's office empty and dark.  
  
She scurried through the hall from the elevator bay but stopped just outside the door. She had to look presentable, like she wasn't as rushed and frazzled as she felt. She needed to look like this was any other morning and she was returning to the office after a perfectly normal, absolutely ordinary night. Drawing in a deep breath, Quinn smoothed her skirt and made sure her hair was neat and free of flyaways. She reached out and tugged open the glass door that led to the main newsroom. She paused a moment to flash a smile for Gina, the receptionist, who thankfully seemed to stay out of the gossip mill despite probably having the best sense of anyone in the office of everyone's comings and goings. "Good morning," Quinn offered with a sweet smile that felt false but she hoped looked better. "Is Mr. Nichols-"  
  
"Already in," Gina replied with a sympathetic grimmace, and Quinn did her best to not let her face fall. The last thing she needed to deal with right now was a lecture from her boss about responsibility and being accountable for one's actions. She forced a smile and started toward her desk even as Gina called out in an attempt to be helpful, "But only for a few minutes!", as though there were a chance Mr. Nichols wouldn't notice her absence if he hadn't been in for very long. Unlikely, since he wasn't ancient and adle-minded, but she appreciated the receptionist's attempt at a consolation. It was better than any of the other girls in the office would give her, that was for sure.  
  
There was a particular pace, Quinn knew, at which she could get to her desk faster but not draw attention herself. It was an art form - too fast and everyone would notice she was late; too slow and it wouldn't help her pace. She quickened her steps, grateful for the carpet that deadened the sound of her heels. She could see her desk from here - empty, of course, like a beacon that just begged everyone to notice she was late-  
  
They might not guess that, she tried to assure herself. For all they knew, she had been here for hours and just run out to do an errand for her boss. She wasn't sure what kind of errand would mean coming back to the office empty-handed, and certainly if Mr. Nichols had noticed she was absent that theory would go down the drain, but she held out hope as she passed close to two dozen desks, noting with dismay how many eyes rose to see who was moving so quickly. She set her purse on her desk, breathing a sigh of relief as she slipped gracefully out of her coat. People might have checked to see who was walking past their desk, but no one had seemed to hold focus on her which meant none of them assumed she was doing anything that needed their attention. Now she just had to hope that Mr. Nichols had gone straight into his office without even pretending to notice whether she was there or not, the same way he did most mornings, and she would be fine. She tucked her coat into her desk drawer just as Marcia walked through the newsroom. The tall platinum blonde seemed to strut everywhere she went, flanked always by sycophants who hung on in hopes of remaining in her good graces. "Quinn," she greeted with a fake bright tone that didn't quite match the smirk on her face. "So nice to see you. We were worried you might be ill or something."  
  
Quinn wasn't proud to admit that, in another world with different circumstances, she might have been that girl. Hell, in another lifetime she had been that girl - striding down the hallways of her high school, loving the way every girl wanted to be her and every boy wanted to take her out. She remembered feeling so powerful and like she could get anything she wanted...until suddenly she couldn't.  
  
Sadly, Marcia's downfall was unlikely to occur in the next five minutes, so Quinn pasted on her sweetest dagger-eyed smile and replied, "Not at all. I was running an errand for Mr. Nichols."  
  
Marcia exchanged looks with the girls at either shoulder, all of them seeming barely able to contain their derisive laughter, then she asked, "What kind of 'errand?'" Her voice dripped with a saccharine tone, eyes wide as though pretending to be naive, which only made Janet work harder to hold back her giggles. Before Quinn could offer one, Marcia continued, "Because I couldn't help but notice he just arrived, and you came in about five minutes after he did, so I'm not sure when he would have had time to ask you to do something for him - unless he called you at home. Or somewhere other than home- Good morning, Mr. Nichols."   
  
Quinn turned quickly to see her boss looming in the door of his office. "Marcia," he acknowledged with a quick nod. "Quinn, I need you." He ducked back into his office, and Quinn tried to follow him as quickly as possible while retaining as much dignity as possible. Sad to say, that wasn't much; she could hear the girls snickering behind her, and she shot them a look as she closed the office door. "Late start this morning?" he asked, and Quinn did her best to stand a bit taller and straighter.  
  
She had nothing to hide. She didn't need to make up a story, she could- well. She couldn't really tell the  _truth_. Being a career girl with a car too nice for her paycheck was one thing, but an unwed girl with a four year old daughter showing up after all this time? There was no way she could explain that. She hadn't even been able to tell Mrs. Hubbard that much, though the old lady had been able to guess from the circumstances. Besides, even if she didn't have to tell him where Beth had come from or why she hadn't been a problem two mornings ago, just having a daughter was bad enough. Mothers never advanced - not even a little. Not to head secretary, not to copy room assistant, not to anything. They got sent home early and were treated like something that would break at any second. For that she could have just wandered into the office straight out of the convent; she had gone to college for a reason and wasn't about to give all of that up now by telling people about something that happened to a person she didn't even recognize anymore.   
  
"Car trouble," she replied.   
  
The excuse worked; Mr. Nichols shook his head and replied, "Problem with not having a husband around - no one to fix the car. Or mow the lawn, unless you get a neighbour boy to do it."  
  
She didn't think it was worth pointing out that she didn't have a lawn - in part because of prices within commuting distance to work and in part because what use was a lawn if there was no one to enjoy it? Although- maybe she should try to find somewhere Beth could run around and play now? She hadn't even though of that before. How in the world would she ever afford a place with a yard? What about repairs? She didn't know anything about fixing electrical sockets or leaky pipes. The girl couldn't live on the couch forever, she at least needed her own bedroom, but money was tight enough as things were; secretaries didn't make that much anyway. What was she-  
  
"Quinn." Mr. Nichols' voice startled her from her thoughts and she blinked, seeing her boss staring at her.   
  
"I'm sorry, what was that?" she asked as cooly as she could.  
  
"Is everything okay?"  
  
She pasted on the best smile possible and nodded, smoothing her skirt. "Of course." It was neither a good lie nor an original one, but he seemed satisfied enough to let it drop.  
  
* * * * *  
  
By the time Quinn reached her building, she was exhausted. Her shoulder ached from the heavy sack of groceries she clutched against her side. The soles of her feet stung from the number of times she had scurried down to the payphone two blocks from the office to try to call preschools and babysitters a couple at a time so no one would notice her absence. Her eyes felt dry and gritty, she guessed probably from peering at so many tiny black numbers in the phone book, and she had what felt like the beginning of a migraine building at the back of her skull. She wanted nothing more than to take a long, hot bath, drink a glass of wine - if only she had any - then take two aspirin and go to bed early. Unfortunately someone else needed dinner...and probably also bathed and tucked in.  
  
She hesitated outside Mrs. Hubbard's door and wished for a moment that she could just keep walking - go to her own apartment and lock the door to shut out her problems. She could, at least in theory. What was Mrs. Hubbard going to do if she did? Call the police and say Quinn had left a strange child with her in the morning and refused to come get her? Who would believe something like that? Besides, Beth...  
  
...Beth looked nothing like her.  
  
The sudden reminder of why Katie had walked away so easily was physically painful, a stab wound piercing her chest, and her fist curled tightly at her side, fingernails jabbing into her palm. No - she wasn't about to do that. Even if she had never wanted any of this-  
  
Well. That wasn't completely true. Things would have been easier if it were.   
  
Still. It wasn't Beth's fault she'd been stupid and easy enough to go over to Puckerman's house in a fit of neediness; the poor girl couldn't help what her hair looked like or that she didn't match Katie's impossible standards. To use that to her advantage in an attempt to run away and make her life simpler would make her no better than her selfish, image-obsessed sister and there was no way, no way at all, she could live with that. Learning to walk away after the choice had been made for her had been one thing - one agonizing thing - but to do the same on her own... She drew in a deep breath and knocked before she had a chance to lose her nerve. There was silence, and when it dragged on for several long moments, Quinn leaned in, pressing her ear to the door to see if she could hear anything. Were they even inside? Had she been gone too long and Mrs. Hubbard had grown fed up and taken Beth to some kind of orphanage? She couldn't imagine the dragon lady taking a four year old to a park or running errands with her in tow.  
  
The door jerked open, and it took Quinn a second to pull back, off-balance from the heavy sack in her arms. "Spying on me?" Mrs. Hubbard asked gruffly, eyes narrow.  
  
On any other day, Quinn would have asked what in the world Mrs. Hubbard thought was interesting enough about her life to be worth that kind of effort, but she had been raised well enough to know that you didn't insult someone who had just done you an enormous favour. "Of course not," she replied simply. The woman had not changed out of her mismatched slippers, though she did wear a sweater and slacks now instead of a bathrobe; she guessed that was a good sign. "How was she?"  
  
"Little late, aren't you?" Mrs. Hubbard asked as though she hadn't heard the question.  
  
"I'm sorry, I tried to get here as fast as I could but I had to stop at the store," Quinn replied, nodding toward the paper bag. Mrs. Hubbard didn't look impressed but didn't throw back a retort, so Quinn asked again, "How was she today?"  
  
"Rambunctious little one, isn't she?"  
  
"I guess, I don't really..." Though the concept wasn't new, but being reminded of it was: She had no idea about her own daughter. What she was like, what she enjoyed, whether she preferred french toast or waffles on a Saturday morning...she knew Katie always baked a chocolate cake for Beth's birthday, though she wasn't sure whose choice that was, and she knew Beth couldn't sit properly in a skirt, and that she had Puck's eyes, and that was all. Four years of life and that was all she was left with.   
  
Not anymore, she reminded herself. She would be finding out a lot of things pretty quickly now. The realization was more overwhelming and terrifying than reassuring.  
  
"Yeah. Right." Mrs. Hubbard looked her up and down with a withering gaze, then called over her shoulder in a smoke-deep rasp, "Beth - c'mon. Time to go." A moment later a shock of dark hair appeared behind the old woman's hip, then two bright eyes gazed up at Quinn in surprise.  
  
Quinn felt sick. The girl hadn't expected her to come back - despite the promise, despite having no reason to doubt-  
  
She had plenty of reason to doubt, Quinn corrected herself. Still, the lack of faith stung. She should have been able to believe, to trust, to know that mothers came back.  
  
Despite the queasy ache, she forced a smile for the girl and greeted as brightly as she could, "Hi, Beth. Did you have fun today?" It had been too long since she had babysat - probably junior high, if she remembered right, because after that cheerleading took up most of her evenings and weekends - but the tone of voice that seemed to come out only around children slipped back as easily as if it had been days instead of years.  
  
"Uh-huh-" Beth's gaze dropped as she corrected herself. "Yes ma'am."  
  
It didn't take much imagination to picture the years of sharp rebuke Katie had dished out. Was she supposed to tell her it was okay? Praise her for knowing to correct it herself instead of being prompted? Say that there was no need to call her ma'am since she was technically her mom now? Quinn had no idea. Instead she kept her tone bright and changed the subject. "Ready to go? I brought ingredients for spaghetti." That earned a grin, and Beth nodded. She held out her free hand, which Beth took quickly, and Quinn barely had a chance to toss a quick but sincere "Thank you, Mrs. Hubbard!" over her shoulder before heading down the hall, hungry little girl in tow.  
  
Half an hour later, Quinn sponged the counters clean. She had forgotten just how impossible it was to keep sauce from splattering over the stovetop. From the table, she could hear the scrape of knife and fork against the plate as Beth ate her pasta - did she even want to know how messy her daughter would be by the end of the meal? The girl meant well and all, clearly she tried, but Quinn imagined an entire face and dress stained red. She turned to look; Beth sat ramrod straight in her chair, utensils gripped in her fist, clumsily trying with precise yet inaccurate movements to twirl her noodles around the tines of her fork, knife used more like a backstop to keep the strands of pasta from twirling too vigorously and splattering. It wasn't terribly effective, but Quinn wondered how many dinners the girl had sat through trying so hard to get things right but still having Katie tell her she was wrong?  
  
She was four. She wasn't meant to be good at any of this yet. Quinn didn't even remember starting etiquette training beyond basic table manners until she was probably closer to 6, and she was sure that even she had made messes of her face and clothes before she was school-aged. She would never have saddled her daughter with that, not yet. She shook her head in frustration and disgust; what was so wrong with Beth that she had to be trained and changed and then passed off again? What could possibly make Katie see only the mistakes and not how hard the girl tried?  
  
Because she was never Katie's, Quinn sighed quietly to herself. Just an obligation.  
  
...She had imagined this, once. Well, maybe not  _this_ , but raising her. Knowing her. Sitting cross-legged on a narrow wooden bed, the heavy clunk of the Sisters' orthopedic shoes outside in the hallway, she had touched her enormous, bloated stomach and imagined holding her baby girl, feeding her, reading her bedtime stories...the images had been warm, comforting when everything felt like it was moving too fast. Then in an instant all of that had been gone and she had walked out of the hospital with empty arms and just-... _empty_. During college it had felt like the right thing, at least sometimes - when it wasn't agonizingly painful, it felt perfect. Besides, she had told herself, Katie knew what she was doing. Katie knew how to raise children, she had two of her own already. She knew how to teach them what to do.  
  
Quinn didn't know why it hadn't occurred to her that Katie's version of raising children would be exactly like everything she had been so glad to move on from.  
  
Beth's tongue stuck out of the corner of her mouth slightly, brow furrowed in concentration, as she spun the fork, and Quinn knew she was no expert but she was sure eating spaghetti should not cause anyone to look so frustrated. She shook her head a little and fixed herself a plate, sitting across from the girl. "Noodles are tricky," she offered, not sure what exactly she was meant to say, and the nervousness  _ached_  as much as anything. A mother should know what to say to her daughter. A mother should be able to know not just what was wrong, but how to fix it.  
  
Not that hers ever had. This had all been her mother's stupid idea in the first place - sweep it under the rug, pretend everything's fine, make believe that she was still the perfect daughter and her sister was the ideal caregiver... She wondered if the angry queasiness inside her would ever go away when she thought about it. Every time she looked at the girl, she felt so-  
  
Beth looked up quickly in surprise, the look of concentration slipping for a moment as she offered a faint, sheepish grin. "Yeah. They slip. And roll 'cause they're round."  
  
Quinn smiled faintly. "Yeah, they are." Beth knew round - did that mean she knew shapes? Was she supposed to? That seemed like the sort of thing someone learned in kindergarten, but did that mean Beth was smarter than average for her age, which would be surprising considering who she took after in every other regard? Or had Katie just shoved her so hard that she had learned things with her older "siblings" whether she wanted to or not? Quinn had no idea. She guessed they would figure out that part once Beth was in school. "Do you read yet?"  
  
"Mommy reads to me," she replied, then her brow furrowed. "I mean- not Mommy but, um..."  
  
"It's okay," Quinn replied quickly. It had hurt so badly the first time she heard her daughter call Katie "Mommy," but she had grown numb to it over time, soothed by perpetually reassuring herself that it had been the best decision for everyone and that her sister was much better equipped to be a mother than she was. She couldn't even imagine having to figure out what else to call her own mother after so many years, and she was pretty sure that had to be a cakewalk compared to getting a four year old to do the same. "I know who you mean." Beth just nodded then went back to digging at her pasta. Quinn sighed quietly to herself and began to twirl her fork, barely able to concentrate on food as she wondered what precisely she was meant to do now. She had a place for Beth to go during the days now, and she was pretty sure that the girl would be okay on the couch until she could save up enough to move them into a 2-bedroom apartment somewhere. And there was enough food in the kitchen for two people now, at least until the weekend. But all of that was easy - it hadn't seemed that way, but it was. It was triage. It wasn't  _raising_  her daughter, it was just making sure neither of them keeled over before the end of the day. That was - and it exhausted her to even think it - the easy part. Now she had to figure out  _everything else_.   
  
What time did she need to put Beth to bed? Should she let her have dessert? Was she meant to be able to recite the alphabet yet? Write her name?  _Could_  she do any of that yet? And if she couldn't, should Quinn be pushing her to? Or should it wait until next year when she started school? Should she praise Beth for trying to eat spaghetti 'correctly' or correct her gently to try to keep more sauce on the food and off the clothes and furniture? A thousand questions raced through her mind, each seemingly more minute than the last. She sat back, dizzy and overwhelmed; each query amounted to the same thing:   
  
What was she, as Beth's mother, going to do to raise her?  
  
The icy terror that had gripped her the night before was back as the enormity of the undertaking washed over her once more. Running around all day to try to juggle everything had been intense but at the same time kept at least some of her focus off the big picture. She hadn't been able to focus on anything beyond tonight, maybe the next day or two - but Beth wasn't going to magically vanish at the end of the week. And she certainly wasn't going to raise herself. At some point she was going to need a mother to guide her from an unruly 4-year-old into a young lady.  
  
Quinn wished Katie weren't the reason for this whole situation - or that her mother weren't responsible for the entire fiasco in the first place. She wanted more than anything to be able to talk to one of them, ask what she should do - where she should even begin. Babysitting wasn't anything like raising a child, and both of them had done it...not exactly  _well_ , but well enough, she guessed, and it was better than her own experience which was sadly lacking.  
  
Katie's own children were growing up nicely...  
  
She felt her blood boil as she thought of her sister raising two little perfect children - and the cost of such perfection - but she had to admit that, with the exception of the obvious cruel mistake, Katie was a good mother. The problem with Beth was that Katie had never considered her her own daughter, but the two children she knew were hers were well-behaved and well-loved. That meant she had to be good at this somehow.  
  
There could be worse role models...she wasn't sure how, exactly, considering she had abandoned a 4-year-old girl for not looking enough like the rest of the family, but who else was there to look to?  
  
Quinn swallowed hard, feeling resigned. She had spent the past four years trying desperately to get out of her family's clutches, to get away from the artificially warm glow that seemed to follow them everywhere, to avoid everything she had been nudged toward her whole life and make out her own path in the world. But it wasn't just about her now; the little girl across the table needed a mother, not a woman who had read The Feminine Mystique six times. Not that she was giving up her job - she couldn't even if she wanted to, which she  _didn't_  - she couldn't afford not to work, and besides she genuinely enjoyed working. But when it came to how to handle her daughter...maybe she could do worse than trying to think of what her sister might do.  
  
Or what her sister would have done if Beth had been hers.  
  
She sat up a little, wanting to set a better example for the girl slouched across the table, and forced a faint, stiff smile despite her physical and mental exhaustion. "Here," she said, reaching across to adjust Beth's hand around the knife. "Like this. Now try." The fork twirled again, just as awkwardly as before, and Beth looked more determined than ever to be neat despite every indication that she couldn't be.  
  
Maybe this would be harder than she thought.


	3. Chapter 3

Quinn groaned as the tinny bell of the alarm roused her slowly from her dreams. They had been fantastic, too - highlights of Radcliffe dinners out with practically the whole floor; study groups in the cozy back room she favoured at the library with a half-dozen brilliant young women; classes where it seemed like everything in the world was open to her, her future spread before her like an open road stretched endlessly over lush green horizons.  
  
She opened one eye slowly, hoping against logic that maybe she really would wake back at school, surrounded by the quiet, purposeful bustle of her dorm just as it had been every morning. Instead she saw only the ajar door of her closet, with its clutter she kept meaning to clean and the dresses she really did need to get to the dry cleaner.  
  
Maybe, she thought, if she went back to sleep and tried again.  
  
No - she sighed and pushed back the quilt, shivering against the sudden chill. If she went back to sleep and tried again to wake up in a life more closely resembling her own, she would just have less time to pull everything together. And she needed every minute she could get.  
  
Her feet hit the floor and she reached over to turn off the alarm. 6:02 a.m. - she missed her extra hour of sleep immensely.  
  
The hot water spraying down on her helped, keeping the cool mid-October air at bay while she poured shampoo into her palm and went over the dozen mental lists and enjoyed a few moments of relative silence, free from the clamour of the newsroom and chatter of the ladies' room and the exuberantly upbeat music of children's television shows - just the rush of water echoing against the shower tile. There were plenty of things to be sure she remembered to do: breakfast, getting them both dressed, packing both bags...in a perfect world things that should take no more than an hour but that inevitably took closer to two. Plus all her usual tasks at work, and a feature she was meant to proof-read before it went up the chain, and a thousand things that would fall into her lap without warning because the newspaper business was inherently - almost proudly - completely unpredictable. Then out of the office at 6 to pick up Beth before the daycare closed at 6:30, dinner, and at some point she had to make cookies for Beth's group - all the mothers did it. Of course, all those mothers baked and most didn't work full-time like she did, and she was pretty sure they had all been raising their children from birth and not from a month ago which was probably why their daughters' dresses stayed spotless all day.  
  
She was still working on that part. Beth still came home every evening with something ripped or grass-stained or a new bandage on her hand or knee or cheek because she had insisted on jumping off something she shouldn't have. And every evening she demanded to know why - and what Beth could possibly have been thinking...still no answers on that, either, but Quinn was confident they would get there. Eventually.  
  
She just wished "eventually" would hurry up. She had good impressions to make, and that was hard when her daughter was a mess and she felt exhausted all the time.  
  
But she could do this. She was still finding her rhythm, that was all. She could already see her improvement - she didn't hesitate before scolding Beth anymore, for one thing, and she found herself asking what Katie would do less often because the answer came to her automatically. Would Katie let Beth have dessert if she tried to hide broccoli in her napkin? Of course not. Would she take away tv time for ruining her brand new dress? Absolutely.  
  
The stability was good for Beth, too - Quinn was pretty sure anyway. With everything else changing, at least Beth had the same rules and standards. If she were used to strictness and was suddenly allowed to run wild, that would be disaster. In time, though, Beth would be as well-mannered as her obnoxiously perfect blond cousins, Quinn thought to herself as she lathered shampoo through her own golden bob.  
  
If they could just skip to that stage instead of the one they were currently stuck in though...the stage where Beth threw a fit every morning as Quinn wrangled her into a dress and tugged her practically uncontrollable hair into two neat braids...something about the way Beth insisted it would all just get ruined made Quinn wonder if the girl didn't do it on purpose sometimes, out of spite. Could a four-year-old be spiteful? Did they even know how? Was it ingrained or something they learned around- well, Quinn could remember wanting revenge when she was 6. She had no idea, but some evenings when she picked up a ragdoll where she had left a perfect porcelain only ten hours before, she had to wonder.  
  
The water cascading over her head began to cool, and Quinn grimaced at the lukewarm spray, cursing the need to hurry along and leave her refuge. Still, there was too much to do in too little time anyway, so even if for some reason an icy shower suited her, she didn't have the luxury of staying in the shower forever. With a resigned sigh and a cursory rinse, she twisted the tap off and stepped out of the tiled haven.  
  
She listened for a moment, hoping reluctantly for muffled sound through the bathroom door. Some mornings Beth woke up on her own or from the alarm and Quinn would emerge to find the little girl watching television. Though she was sure it was the sort of thing Katie would never condone, it was preferable to the alternative: the girl on the couch who slept like a rock and kicked at the cusions - and anything else nearby - when awakened against her will.  
  
Quinn knew she shouldn't be too hard on the girl for it. She had never been a morning person until cheerleading forced her to become one, and she was pretty sure Puck had been the same way...at least as a teenager, she had no idea what his sleeping habits were like now. Even in the womb Beth had been far more active in the evening. But mornings were busy enough without spending ten minutes trying to rouse the girl and another twenty trying to prod her to eat more quickly. Her attitude wasn't so bad at all once she was awake - truly awake - but until then...  
  
Quinn sighed as silence greeted her. No luck.  
  
Quinn slipped into her robe and sat down at the vanity, hoping maybe there would be movement in the living room while she finished getting ready. The first week, she had foolishly thought she could finish getting ready while Beth took careful spoonfuls of oatmeal or perfectly-cut forkfuls of french toast, but to no avail; the girl needed constant prodding to keep going if they didn't want everything to grind to a halt. If Quinn ever wanted to make it to work on time, she needed to be completely ready before Beth even got up.  
  
It made sense, she guessed; she couldn't remember ever seeing her mother without her makeup, not even first thing in the morning. It was apparently one of those maternal tricks - and one of the easier ones to master with proper scheduling and accounting for time. There were plenty of other mother tricks she had yet to master. Waffles that never stuck to the iron she was still working on. Hair looking as perfect at 8 pm as it had in the morning. But putting on makeup before breakfast? That was a simple fix.  
  
She wondered if Katie had a trick to the waffle thing. She couldn't exactly call and ask; the only thing she wanted less than her sister checking up on how things were going with her and Beth together was her sister asking about Beth at all. Katie had lost the right to ask about her when she just  _discarded_  her for not living up to some impossible standard. How dare she ask anything about the girl she had raised for four years and tossed aside for...what For her hair?  
  
If she even asked. Was it worse if she didn't ask at all?  
  
No; Katie would ask. It would be too unspeakably rude not to ask after someone's daughter. Katie was many things, and Quinn could name them all, but she was never impolite...even when disowning her daughter.  
  
Quinn rolled her eyes and patted the powder puff over her cheeks and nose. She would figure out the waffles some other way. Nothing was work the fury calling her sister would cause.  
  
Besides - when would she find the time?  
  
* * * * *  
  
Of the many skills she had honed in the past month, the one Quinn was most proud of was the ability to slip into the office completely unnoticed at precisely the stroke of 9. After too many days drawing the attention of Marcia and her throng of self-satsified hangers-on - which of course meant Marcia made sure everyone else noticed too - Quinn had realized the key to appearing unremarkable was nonchalance. Racing through the newsroom at a break-neck pace in her overcoat was like a neon arrow pointing the office girls toward her. On the other hand, if she strode in casually with an armful of work, coat draped over her arm, gaze steady as though she had nothing to worry about, she could be as unnoticed as a bar tucked back into an alley instead of a diner with a bright blinking sign; no noticed unless they knew what they were looking for.  
  
She wasn't sure she could remember ever  _wanting_  to be invisible before. She had loved being noticed when she was younger, certainly by the time she was in high school and college, and while what she wanted to be noticed for had changed over the years, she had never sought anonymity and the ability to blend into her surroundings before. But then, she had never been late so often before.  
  
Quinn checked her watch as she locked her car door with her other hand. 9:03 - a few minutes worse than usual, but better than she expected considering the fight over clothes Beth had thrown. The dress was pink and would just get dirty and "swooshed up too much", whatever in the world that meant, and Beth swore it would just get ruined anyway so why did she have to wear it. She had almost hit her wit's end; for one thing, she had never thrown tantrums like that, at least not that she could remember. Her mother would have lost her mind at such an overt and uncalled-for display of emotion. She certainly hadn't seen Katie's children ever do such a thing either. But from television she had gleaned she should send the girl to her room...which would have worked better if they weren't in such a hurry...and if Beth actually had a room. Either way, she was sure Beth was grounded now, but aside from not letting her watch television after dinner she wasn't really certain what that was meant to be, either. The girl was too young to go to friend's houses, so she couldn't stop that, and she definitely wasn't old enough to make phone calls...She wished she knew other women who were around children enough that she could ask them, but none came to mind. None of the other girls in the office had children, and she couldn't remember the last time she had spent time with anyone from outside work. Most of her college friends weren't even getting married yet - some of the girls she had known, but the majority of the girls she had spent the most time with had adopted similar "no men (at least not yet)" viewpoints, wanting to get somewhere in life besides a cookie-cutter ranch house.   
  
Which left her mother and Katie.  
  
She shook her head, brushing her hair back into place with her fingers as she strode quickly across the parking lot. She kept her pace as even as possible, demeanor calm, as she shrugged first one shoulder then the other out of her overcoat, then draped it over the crook of her arm in one smooth and well-practiced motion. There was no reason rushing couldn't look graceful. Her heels clacked across the polished marble of the building's entrance, and she felt her heartbeat quicken as she pressed the elevator button and waited for the doors to open. The waiting was always the worst; racing all morning at least kept her moving, kept her in a forward motion toward getting to work, and once she was at her desk there was always plenty to do to propel her day forward. But having to stop, incapable of doing anything except preparing her best superior expression and nonchalant walk while counting every second as it ticked by and reminded her of just how long ago she should have been at her desk...she sighed in relief as the doors opened and she stepped inside.   
  
The ride to the third floor was blissfully short, and as she took her first step onto the carpeted lobby, she glanced for something she could carry. The desks were light on free material, but she spied a stack of stories red with editing marks. She could easily deliver those - it would be saving someone else a trip around the office and give her a chance to stash her coat at her desk without being quite so noticeable.  
  
Eyes darting casually first to one side then the other, Quinn walked through the newsroom with purpose. The vultures were nowhere to be found, thankfully, and she made it to her desk without feeling so much as a single eyeball on her. She shifted the stack of papers to one arm as she let her overcoat slip onto her desk chair, then made her way to distribute the edited stories.  
  
And no one was any the wiser.  
  
With a self-satisfied smile, Quinn sorted through the stack, separating them by department. Deciding to start at the back of the office suite and work her way across the floor before moving upstairs, she rearranged the batches and started down the hallway. A giggle caught her attention as she neared the kitchen; the sound alone wasn't so unusual, especially among the girls in Marcia's circle who used coquettish innocence as a sign of virtual superiority. The bass rumble of a man's voice in response, on the other hand...Quinn rolled her eyes and kept walking. It must be nice to have time to flirt at work instead of doing a job. And to think she was worried about people noticing her late start to the day - at least once at work she  _did_  something.  
  
She wished she had the luxury of  _not_  doing something. At work, at home, ever...she remembered taking bubble baths not so long ago, relaxing after a long workday...Now she would love just five minutes to be somewhere - anywhere - doing nothing at all.  
  
She glanced into the kitchen as she passed. Marcia leaned back against the counter, coffee pot beside her as though she had been distracted mid-task, smiling and practically batting her eyes at one of the senior editors. And to think she had the nerve to accuse Quinn of having a rich married man to buy her a car...but outgrace would have required surprise, and that she absolutely couldn't muster.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Quinn sighed as she hung up the phone. Surely enough, 4:30 and a call that Beth had fallen and torn her tights - and scraped her knee. The girl was fine, cheerful apartment about how far she had jumped from the tree limb she wasn't meant to be climbing on, but the condescension in the voice of the daycare worker had been almost tangible through the phone. The girls who worked there were younger than she was, the rest grandmotherly ladies who had done and seen it all, and no matter whose turn it was to make The Call, Quinn could hear their passive-aggressive admonishments in stretches of silence and superior inflection.  _Their_  daughter never did things like this. They weren't even her age, but  _they_  had it together. If Quinn had  _taught_  her daughter properly, this wouldn't have happened. She wanted to point out that the reason to leave a child in their care was supposedly to ensure supervision, otherwise she would leave her daughter in the apartment all day - it would certainly be less expensive.  
  
But she knew better; she had been trained better. Passive aggression was to be met with more of the same - never with objections or pointing out why what they were saying was ridiculous.  
  
At least Beth was okay. The girl had to be made by the DuPont corporation or something.  
  
She didn't know how to explain the relief. Even though Beth always came home a wreck and always played rough over there, when they said there had been an accident she had just  _frozen_  and felt like she couldn't breathe for a moment.  
  
She glanced at her watch - it was much too early to leave work, and even if anyone might let her go if she had a good enough reason, what would she say? She couldn't very well tell them she was going to take care of a daughter none of them knew she had. Besides, a skinned knee was nothing - par for the course of having a child. She didn't know what she would do if she left early anyway...watch the news and make dinner early? Beth was  _fine_ , it wasn't as though she needed to go to the doctor or was even upset and needed soothing. Still, she couldn't shake the gnawing desire to leave regardless of the hour.  
  
Skinned knees might be par for the course, but she supposed...a mother should be the one putting on the bandage.  
  
If Beth would even care if she were there. Quinn was under no illusion that the girl she had carried inside of her felt any special affinity toward her. Beth spent far more waking hours at the daycare than at home anyway, and most of that time seemed to be a fight over some thing or another.  
  
Still...Quinn leaned down and adjusted her purse and coat, considering it for a moment. Maybe if-  
  
The sound of a man clearing his throat made Quinn jump and look up, guilty as though she had been caught actually leaving at 4:35. Mr. Nichols gazed down at her, eyebrows knitted in clear skepticism. Quinn hurried to calm her breathing as she asked in as even voice as she could muster, "Do you need something Mr. Nichols?"  
  
His eyebrows lowered as he studied her, but she remained cool and collected, not about to get herself in trouble just for  _thinking_ about leaving early. After a long pause, he replied, "Yes. Come inside for a moment, won't you Quinn?"  
  
She knew it was crazy to swear she felt every eye on her; he hadn't spoken that loudly, for one thing, and even if he had, it was perfectly normal for a boss to ask his girl into his office. Dictations, notes about a sensitive call he was expecting...secretaries dealt with plenty of issues best situated to an office with the door closed.  
  
Even if she had a sinking feeling that wasn't why he wanted to see her, judging from his tone, the way he looked displeased but also confused and maybe a little exasperated...  
  
But in case any eyes were on her, Quinn wasn't about to give them the satisfaction of seeing her sweat. She smiled cordially and replied, "Of course, Mr. Nichols," grabbing her steno pad and smoothing her skirt as she stood. He led her the few steps into his office and gestured toward the couch as he closed the door behind them.  
  
There was a long silence that felt even longer. She wasn't sure what to say - should she admit to being late and apologize? For how many times - how many did he know about? And what excuse could she possible give if pressed? "My secret daughter takes forever to eat French toast" was hardly an option for so many reasons. She wasn't sure why he seemed so hesitant, either; he clearly wanted to talk to her or ask her  _something_...and unless he was waiting for her to spontaneously confess, for which he would have to wait a  _very_  long time, she didn't understand what he could possibly want from her.  
  
Finally, with a sigh, he leaned back against his desk and asked, "What's going on with you, Quinn?"  
  
She kept her posture politely stiff, breathing even, as she asked, "What do you mean?"  
  
"Don't play dumb. I know you're smarter than that. You used to be the best girl out there, always in early and staying late..." Quinn smiled faintly at the recognition as well as the memory. She had been good at her job - very good. People had sought her out for tasks because of her reputation for getting things done on-time and right. That had felt good, like even if it weren't her dream job by a long shot, she was still proving her parents wrong at every turn. Like she was on her way to being so much more than a housewife and dinner party host. "Lately though, you barely put in 7 hours, you're distracted, you take personal calls at your desk..."  
  
"Only during my lunch break," she tried to claim, but the look on her boss's face told her they both knew that wasn't true. "I'm sorry," Quinn replied sincerely. "I won't let it happen again."  
  
"I don't want an apology." She blinked, not sure how to take that or what to say instead. "I want to know why. To understand."  
  
Understand? She almost laughed at the thought. What could a happily married man in his late 30s with a perfect family that would fit in around her parents and sisters without any problems possibly understand about the bizarre turn her life had taken? She could barely wrap her head around it; understanding was a long way off. It might come someday, far in the future when getting out the door in the morning didn't take all her energy and resolve. Maybe then - and only then - could she sit down and sort out all of the "why," but until then...  
  
"Who is he?"  
  
Quinn's eyebrows lowered in confusion. "Who's who?"  
  
"The man who's got you like this. To be this unfocused, it has to be either really great or really bad."  
  
She bristled. Even when nothing in her personal life had anything to do with a man, the few men she couldn't remove from her existence swore it must all be about a boy. He probably thought she was head-over-heels in puppy love or getting ready to plan a wedding. Not in a million years. "There's no man," she stated unequivocally.  
  
"C'mon, Quinny, you can tell me - I won't be mad. I've seen it before."  
  
The patronizingly jovial tone combined with the nickname she despised and associated with people who made her so angry she could scream stiffened her posture further. "There's no boy," she stated again through gritted teeth, ankles practically locked around one another. "I can't even remember the last time I went on a date, let alone-"  
  
"Is that the problem? Because-"  
  
She could feel her frustration bubbling up. She couldn't win - no matter what her personal life was, he assumed- what in the world gave him the right to- "It has nothing to do with men," she replied tersely. There's no boy, and that's  _fine_. More than fine - I wouldn't have time for one anyway with the little girl who dropped into my lap."  
  
She wasn't sure at first if she had said any of it out loud, and if so which parts, until she saw the stunned, confused expression on Mr. Nichols' face. "What happened?"  
  
"What do you mean?"  
  
"Was there a death, or- you have a sister, right? Is she okay, or...?" he stumbled awkwardly over potential tragedies, and for a few moments Quinn contemplated lying. She could say that she was raising her because something awful had happened to Katie. It might not even be lying, really, if losing all sense of heart and perspective was an awful thing that could happen to a person.  
  
Or she could invent another sister, one unable to take care of a child. Someone young and scared and wanting more for herself...  
  
But she was so tired of lying about who Beth was to her. She had lived through four years of  _her daughter_  calling her "Aunt Quinn" and calling Katie "Mommy," four years of lying to her roommates about whose baby pictures she kept beside her bed... She couldn't do it anymore. If one good thing were to come out of all this, surely it had to be that she didn't need to lie anymore.  
  
The euphoria of knowing she didn't have to pretend or deny what she had been through anymore was just enough to override the fear of what would happen if she said anything, and she replied, "No. I'm her mother."  
  
The relief of saying it for the first time overwhelmed her and she felt her eyes tearing up. The last thing she wanted to do was cry in front of her boss, and she glanced away, looking up in vain to pull herself back together. She had imagined saying it before - years before - but never like this, and if she had any hope of retaining even scraps of her dignity to say nothing of her job, she needed to hold onto at least  _some_  of her control. Tears brushed away with delicate fingertips, she waited for a response, but there was only unnerving silence.  
  
She looked over at her boss cautiously, trying to gauge his reaction, but she couldn't. A lot of men wouldn't keep a girl with children -t hey thought it was cruel to keep a child from its mother all day, as though it wasn't also cruel to shut women out of their jobs for having families. Quinn had long suspected the cruelty rationale was just masking a fear of inconvenience; after all, sometimes mothers needed days off and had to cook dinner instead of staying until 10:30 at night. Others might keep the woman around, but any hope of advancing was ripped away. The thought of losing all of it when she had worked so hard-  
  
"How...I mean, when did...you didn't take any time off- and your figure...?" He stammered, clearly at a loss as to how to process the news, let alone how to proceed.  
  
Did he honestly think she meant an infant? For a man who had children of his own, that seemed pretty stupid. "No," she replied slowly. "My sister took care of her while I was in college." She hoped he wouldn't ask why now. She couldn't handle trying to explain without letting her unabashed contempt show through.  
  
"So she's...five?"  
  
"Four," Quinn corrected.  
  
"Four," he mused slowly, shaking his head and leaning back against his desk, arms crossed over his chest.  
  
When he said nothing else, seeming deep in thought, calculating, Quinn jumped in to plead her case as professionally as possible. "I've just been getting into the swing of things. I'm sorry my work has suffered, but I promise you it won't happen again. My personal life won't interfere with work in any way."  
  
Mr. Nichols blinked as though trying to understand where that had come from, then his eyes widened. "Oh- no," he chuckled quietly, though Quinn didn't see what was funny about pleading for her job. "I'm not letting you go," he assured her.  
  
"You're not," she repeated cautiously.  
  
"Of course not. When you're on your game, you're a hundred times better than anyone else I could hire,"he replied like it should be obvious. "No, I was just thinking how... _hard_  this must have been for you. How early you must have...grown up. That's all."  
  
With someone else, she might have talked about it. Not that she wanted to  _talk_  necessarily, and not that there was anyone to talk to. But "hard" was so right and such an understatement all at the same time. Being sent away had been humiliating and terrifying, and labour had been excruciating but paled in comparison to the feeling of leaving the hospital with empty arms. And now feeling constantly like she had to be doing something wrong because all the other mothers made it look so much easier than her day ever felt... But to her boss, she simply replied, "It hasn't been easy."  
  
Nichols offered a faint reassuring smile. "Good for you." his tone was awkward but sincere, genuinely kind rather than patronizing, and Quinn returned the smile as she accepted the praise. It was an odd thing to be praised for - getting up and doing what she literally had no choice in doing every morning - but it felt good to hear anything. Even if he had no idea what a wreck her apartment was or that her daughter was scraped up in shredded tights, the minute act of kindness felt like a rush of fresh air in a stale room - not nearly enough to live on, but it helped immensely. After another awkward silence, he pushed himself away from the desk and moved toward the door. "I'll let you get back to work."  
  
Quinn stood, nodding. "Absolutely." she closed the distance to the door and was surprised as Mr. Nichols put his hand on her shoulder.  
  
"If there's anything you need, let me know."  
  
The offer came out of the blue, and she had no idea what to make of it. She certainly wasn't about to be one of those working women who asked for special treatment or extra time off - did he think she was? She was pretty sure he wouldn't be much help with child-rearing tips. And whatever he planned to offer, his hand made her a little uncomfortable. But as quickly as it was there, it was gone and Mr. Nichols opened the door. His hand slipped to her lower back for a moment to usher her out, then he closed the door behind her.  
  
Maybe the touching was an awkward attempt at comfort. Her own father wasn't physically demonstrative, but her boss might be. She wasn't about to mention it while he was busy not firing her.  
  
She looked up to see Marcia's smug face staring at her from a few desks away. Great - Quinn could tell from the knowing smirk what the girl thought she knew. There was a time she would have done everything in her power to stop the rumour before it started...or at least to take down the rumour-starter first. Four years ago...she smiled faintly at the thought of the army of girls she would have organized to make Marcia's life miserable if she even considered making up a lie about this.  
  
But she didn't have the kind of time for that now - or the energy. She had work to finish and cookies to bake and a skinned-up, battered, bruised girl to deal with. Maybe Mr. Nichols was right: she had grown up.  
  
With a knowing smile of her own, Quinn sat back down at her desk. The faster she finished her work, the sooner she could get home to her daughter.


	4. Chapter 4

Quinn hated the rain sometimes. Though the cool drops of a summer shower on her face could be nice, the near-icy drizzle of late October in Columbus was anything but pleasant. Even getting out of the apartment surprisingly early hadn't given her an advantage as she sat in traffic an extra half hour because visibility in the dim light of dawn was so poor. A broken umbrella thanks to an unruly gust on the way back from lunch had only compounded her irritation - and that was all before the temperature dipped to freezing in the late afternoon, causing accidents all over town.  
  
"Which do you think we should use?" Mr. Nichols asked, gazing down at the collection of photographs across his office floor - less an array than a partially-contained spray. Quinn had initially organized them by location, but with new photos coming in and constantly picking images up to examine them, the system had long since disintegrated.  
  
"I don't know anymore,"she replied honestly. "I think the three-car from Route 40."  
  
"What happened to the ones Phil took up near Polaris?" he asked, picking through the stack on his lap.  
  
Quinn peered at what he had, then slipped off the couch, kneeling on the floor and sifting through the prints. After a moment, she unearthed them and handed them up to her boss. "Right here." She didn't get to help select the photos all the time, but on occasion - usually if Mr. Nichols felt swamped. He said it was because he liked her eye, but she knew he desperately needed help organizing and narrowing down options. Either way, she was happy for the experience; it would serve her well when she figured out how exactly to move up in the world.   
  
And her eye was damned good, if she did say so.  
  
"Thanks, Quinn." He flipped through the photos slowly, frowning. "A shame we can't use one of these, too."  
  
"What else is getting the space?"  
  
"Johnson's speech, campaign trail..." he waved his hand vaguely, dismissing the story's importance.  
  
"Do you think they might give some of it up? There are still a few weeks until the election, and besides the whole country knows how it's going to turn out anyway." Barry Goldwater wasn't even campaigining north of the Carolinas, at least not in any meaningful way - who could ever win an election just by courting the far right and southern racists? ...And her parents.  
  
"Not likely. Jim hates when Metro asks him for space," Nichols grumbled as he held up the picture he liked beside the one Quinn had selected, trying to decide.  
  
"Lucky for you that he likes me."  
  
"Really? How? I thought he hated everyone."  
  
She had helped out while one of the Politics section secretaries was out with terrible allergies back in June, and from what Quinn could tell Jim just hated anyone high-ranking enough to ask for favours but self-entitled enough to refuse to return them. But she wasn't about to tell her boss that. "Everyone likes me," she replied, brushing it off and preening at the same time. Anyone above the secretarial pool, anyway.  
  
Nichols looked up from the photographs, studying her with a smile. "They do," he agreed, his tone overly sentimental and familiar for Quinn's liking. She shifted uncomfortably under his gaze - it felt a bit too adoring to be merely appreciative, but not quite adoring  _enough_  to be easily understood.  
  
Clearing her throat, she broke from his gaze and checked her watch. "I'll clean these up and go talk to Jim about the extra space. The weather and accidents are more relevant to people around here anyway, he might be willing to give a little. Then if there's nothing else you need...?"  
  
"After that you can go," he confirmed. "See your daughter."  
  
Quinn smiled faintly and began to gather the strewn pictures. Sometimes it all still felt like a dream...or a nightmare, when the day was particularly bad, which was often. With the whirlwind at home, but everything stopped as soon as she got to work and things went back to being as they had been; the jolt back into what felt more and more like her former life was jarring. But someone else knowing helped. She wasn't about to tell anyone else at the office, knowing how things worked around there and the constant need for grist for the rumour mill, but it was nice that her boss knew. It was nicer that he hadn't gotten rid of her. "Thanks." It was already late, but she still felt bad leaving if things weren't done...in part because a lot of the men around the office were hopeless without their girls.  
  
"Here - I'll help you," Nichols offered, slipping off the couch onto the floor beside her. As he stacked photographs, Quinn reached for one that had slid over toward the chair. A large warm hand covered her own and she hesitated, confused. She glanced up to see Mr. Nichols staring at her again with that same look from before. She tried to slip her hand out from under his, to go back to gathering photos and pretending none of this uncomfortable contact had ever happened, but he caught her hand and held it tighter.  
  
His lips were on hers suddenly, stiff and dry but eager and intense. She swore she stopped breathing for a moment as her brain raced to figure out what was going on - and  _why_. Had she said something- or  _done_  something or seemed to want- She tried to shift backwards and away, her hands full of pictures, but instead Nichols pushed her back further, lips still on hers, until she laid atop a field of black and white images of twisted metal carnage.  
  
"Stop," she whispered with her first full breath against his lips.  
  
She expected the mouth to move away from her, to give her space to breathe and think and get away, but instead she felt them curl into a smile. "It's okay, the door is closed," he whispered back. Was that what he thought she cared about - what someone might see? Because while she didn't want to think about what the girls would say, that wasn't why she wanted to be anywhere else right now.   
  
"No- please," she urged, trying to figure out how to get out from under him. He wasn't an enormous man, but he weighed enough to pin her easily and leave her trapped and completely at his non-existent mercy. She could feel his hand on her hip, her skirt, there had to be some way to-  
  
He chuckled low in his throat, and the sound made her want to scream - or vomit. "Oh c'mon, Quinny, you don't have to play coy around me. We both know better. Just-"  
  
It wasn't until her palm hit flesh that she even realized what she had done, and the pain on her own cheek came just as quickly and unexpectedly. She scrambled backwards, heels twisting as they dug into the carpet, until her back hit the desk. "What are you doing?" she demanded, finally looking up to meet the now-infuriated gaze of her boss. Before he could respond, she shoved herself to her feet, her eyes pricked with tears. Her skirt was twisted and her hands reached to straighten it; at the same moment Nichols reached to do the same. "Don't," she commanded sharply. She had to get out of there immediately - the longer she stayed, the more he would keep trying to  _touch_ \- she hurried to the door, yanking the handle as she tugged the door open.  
  
She had to get out of there- before the man formerly known as her boss decided he wanted even more. She had heard of it happening before, but never to  _her_ , never her boss, never the man who wasn't cruel and commandeering, never-  
  
Quinn stumbled into the newsroom, tugging her skirt furiously into place. She had to get out of there - to go get Beth and make dinner and take a shower and forget any of this ever happened. Maybe-   
  
Her head jerked up as she heard a high-pitched giggle. "My..." Marcia gasped in fake surprise, her tone too high and chipper to be genuine, eyes practically twinkling with barely-suppressed glee. "I'm so sorry, I didn't realize I'd be interrupting something." Her perfectly red lips curled into a smirk as her eyes darted from Quinn to something behind her. Quinn turned to see Mr. Nichols leaning in the doorway, looking almost as disheveled as she felt. She was sure she must look beyond awful - clothes askew, mascara running, lipstick smeared...  
  
She wanted the perfect snappy comeback so badly, something to put Marcia in her place, but what could she say? Her mind was blank, nothing but embarrassment and humiliation and rage stronger than she could ever remember feeling before. She wanted to rip the smirk off Marcia's face, to claw out the jubilant eyes, to-  
  
She turned on her heels and stormed out, barely pausing to grab her purse strap on the way past her desk.  
  
The icy rain stung her skin as she sprinted toward the car - why hadn't she thought to grab her coat, too? Should she go back to get it? No; she couldn't go back in there. Not while Marcia smirked and made assumptions and Mr. Nichols talked about how- how  _easy_ she was.  
  
How could he even think that? She was sure from tales of sordid exploits around the office that she had done it less than anyone else there - even if half the stories weren't true, she still...Once. One  _stupid_  time when she was 17 and scared that she wasn't attractive enough because she didn't have a throng of boys drooling after her every day. And because of that one mistake, men were going to think she was a sure thing forever?  
  
Had he thought all of this about her before? Just been waiting to make his move until he had confirmation she wasn't...what? A prude? A virgin? A good enough girl to push him away no matter what it meant for her job? Was that why he had asked so many questions about whether her distractions were over a boy - he was jealous, was that it? He had wanted but known better than to try until he was sure she was a free ride.  
  
Quinn choked on bitter laughter, the sound of her cry filling the car while rain pelted outside. She hadn't even let the Harvard boys near her because she thought...She had been so determined to not lose focus, to stay strong, to follow her own voice and not rely on any man...  
  
She was out of a job, she was sure of it. Even if she hadn't slapped him, bosses sacked their secretaries all the time for not-...well, for not going in the sack. She never would have thought Mr. Nichols would do that - never. He had kept her even knowing her secret when other bosses wouldn't have. But she never would have expected anything like this, and now...  
  
Could  _any_ of them be trusted? Or did all men just view women as their personal possessions, playthings to do with whatever they wanted?  
  
It hadn't been like this at college - she'd felt so much safer surrounded by smart, driven women who understood what she wanted. She should have just stayed there. She could go back, maybe - graduate degrees took a couple years at least, and even if more of the classes at Radcliffe were being taught in conjunction with Harvard now, it could still be okay. There had been men around there before but it had still be wonderful. She could retreat-  
  
...She couldn't, she realized with a devastated cry. How was she going to take care of a daughter and go to school? She couldn't exactly drop the girl back off with Katie - she wished she could, she wanted so  _badly_  to go back to May and never leave the place she had felt so at home. But she had thought- she had  _really_ thought - she'd be okay out in the world. Be a person - a strong, smart, confident woman who didn't need parents to help or anyone's approval to make her good enough, the kind of woman no one tried to tell what to do.  
  
She wished someone would tell her now.  
  
She had to leave the parking lot, that much she knew. Stop for groceries because they were out of practically everything except frozen green beans. Then to pick up Beth-  
  
No. First to pick up Beth; it was already almost 6:30.  
  
Quinn swallowed hard, trying to draw in deep breaths and compose herself enough to drive. There wasn't time to redo her makeup, not if she wanted to make it on time, and she doubted it would go far toward making herself look presentable anyway; her hair stuck out like jaw-length wet straw, and no amount of powder would cover the dark mascara tracks or her bloodshot eyes. Still, she pulled her lipstick from her purse and dabbed it on carefully in the rearview mirror. The red handprint on her cheek was fading already even if the humiliation and anger wasn't. But at least any visual reminder of her boss's lips on hers was concealed under a neat layer of soft pink.  
  
Good as new.  
  
She choked out a sad laugh at the thought and wiped her eyes once more before starting the engine. The long bath she craved so deeply would have to wait.  
  
Traffic was horrible - she'd forgotten that the photographs under her back had meant something, forgotten about the icy pavement that was less slick now but had caused so many accidents...She grew more anxious with each passing moment, caged, fingers tapping hurriedly on the steering wheel. Beth was waiting and there were still errands to run and-  
  
...mostly...if everything else was going to fall apart, she at least needed to be good at this. For all the trouble Beth had caused, at least if she could be a good mother at the end of the day, maybe things wouldn't be quite so awful. It wouldn't make the rest of her day okay or get her job back or fix the reputation she was sure she had around the office by now. But if she wasn't good at this, at being Beth's mother, then it really was all for nothing. All the trouble for  _nothing_.  
  
Not that she knew what the trouble was for anyway. She'd been raised to believe everything happened for reason, that God had plans for everyone and everything, and for all she knew Beth was a punishment for lying and having sex. But if she screwed up the punishment, she could only imagine how much worse things would be.  
  
Maybe her boss propositioning her and then losing her job in disgrace.   
  
By the time she pulled up in front of Beth's daycare, it was a few minutes before 7. Beth sat out on the porch steps sullenly, flanked by one of the older women who looked bored and irritated. Her daughter's dress that had once been light blue was now almost completely caked with dark brown mud, even the collar - how did someone even do that? - with matching brown streaks up her neck and chin. As Beth heard the car pull in, her head jerked up, dark furious eyes framed by thatches of rain-wet hair. Quinn started to park the car, preparing her apology in advance for both her tardiness and the state of her daughter (though she maintained  _they_ owed the second apology), but Beth stormed over to the car and yanked open the door, practically flinging herself into the passenger seat.  
  
"Beth, what on earth-"  
  
"You were  _late,_ " she huffed, still glaring as she slumped further down in her seat, arms folded across her chest.  
  
"I know. I'm sorry," Quinn replied, trying to be sympathetic, but if the girl knew the events of the day - that now apparently was going to include a petulant, sulking child covered in mud - she would understand. If only she were old enough to understand much at all.  
  
"Sure," Beth groused, staring at the dashboard.  
  
Quinn looked over at the front porch, trying to decide whether she needed to go apologize to the woman who had been stuck sitting with Beth after her day should have ended, but she was already gone. Quinn was sure that, with her luck, the lack of apology would be slipped into a future conversation, but she couldn't do anything about it now - even if she wanted to, even if she had the mental energy, which she didn't. She sighed and shook her head. "Seatbelt on," she instructed. Beth didn't move, just grumbled something inaudible. "Beth," she repeated, teeth gritted as she tried not to let her frustration get the better of her. "Seatbelt."  
  
Beth turned her head very slowly to stare right at her as she replied, "No."  
  
Of all the damned days...it was hardly Beth's first act of defiance, but she couldn't take this right now. "Yes," she replied firmly.  
  
" _No._ "  
  
" _Yes._ " Quinn gritted her teeth, face flushed with anger. Why didn't anyone listen to her? What had she done wrong to deserve all of this?  _Katie's_  kids never talked back and refused to do things. Her own mother certainly never had to deal with a daughter like this.  
  
...Except for the one who had sex with the Jewish and possibly half-colored bad boy and got pregnant at 17.  
  
Was this what the next 14 years held? Because there was no way she could handle more. She already felt ready to snap, every nerve frayed, and it had only been a month.  
  
Had it only been a month? And she had  _how_  many months left to go?  
  
Unwilling to resign herself to helplessness until the battle had been won, she reached over and grabbed the seatbelt, buckling Beth in even as she tried to squirm away. "I'm your mother. You have to do what I say."  
  
She wasn't sure she could use that logic when she had spent four years trying to run as far away from everything her own mother wanted her to be as she possibly could. Or when she hadn't been Beth's mother long enough to have that kind of authority. Before she could think about it too hard, Beth rolled her eyes and sulked, "You weren't even coming back."  
  
She was just a kid, Quinn had to remind herself as she froze. Beth had no idea that she'd been desperately, frantically, trying to figure out how to escape back to Massachusetts and a simpler life for herself. She was four years old and scared. That was all. "I wasn't," Quinn stated honestly. She had come back, hadn't she? "I promise, I'm always coming back."  
  
She expected a more positive reaction than the begrudging silence of a slumping mud-covered child, but she accepted it and drove toward the store. She could do this -  _they_  could do this. One step at a time, a firm hand, and...some form of income to replace the one she had surely lost.  
  
The reminder of the evening's earlier events threatened to overwhelm her again, and she clenched the steering wheel tighter as she wound through back roads. One step at a time, she reminded herself. Grocery store first, then dinner, then a warm bath. Tomorrow was tomorrow. She could do this.  
  
It took what seemed like forever to find a parking space. She hadn't expected the store to be so crowded after dinner time. The drive had soothed Beth's mood for the most part, and Quinn had to admit she was jealous of how quickly a four-year-old could let things go. She was still tense, anxious, desperate for something - anything - to go her way, and Beth was...well, tired and hungry, but no longer shooting daggers from her eyes.  
  
As soon as they stepped into the store, half-frozen and dripping wet, she could feel the stares boring into them. It wasn't hard to figure out why: her daughter was a wreck, covered in mud that dripped off her into light brown puddles on the linoleum with every step. She should never have been such a mess - and if she were, she shouldn't have been out, and it was already bedtime - why hadn't the urchin eaten dinner yet? Quinn imagined she didn't look much better, with her streaks of mascara and fading handprint and poorly applied lipsteick...her eye sburned dry and teary at the same time, and she was pretty sure a zombie on the late-night double feature would look better than she did. And feel better, too.  
  
Beth disappeared around the back of one of the aisles, and Quinn called out for her to stop; her voice sounded pathetic even to her own ears. When the girl didn't obey, Quinn took off after her, heels tapping and squeaking on the wet linboleum as she tried to hurry without falling.   
  
Her daughter stood in front of a display of tomato sauce, holding up a jar. "Here," she offered with a proud grin - Quinn guessed because she thought she was helping. She might have appreciated the help more if she couldn't overhear two separate pairs of women whispering about the unruly, unkept little girl and her clearly swamped mother.  
  
"No, Beth, we've had it three times already this week." She heard a gasp and a chuckle at that, and she wanted to turn around and snap at them that if they wanted, they could always cook her daughter's dinner - but that she didn't know how to make very many things and almost everything took at least an hour, and even when the cupboards weren't empty they didn't get home until 7 on the best of days. She wanted to point out that since her daughter was the  _world's slowest eater_ , if she wanted Beth in bed by 9 in a best case scenario, then she couldn't spend more than 20 minutes from the time she walked in until food was on the table.  
  
She wanted to demand to know where  _their_  children were - home, tucked in bed at 7:30? Doing homework while their fathers read the paper? With a nanny? Because they might want to consider for a second that not everyone had the luxury of help. Or time. Or friends to gossip with at some girl's misery.  
  
Instead she just sighed against her growing headache. "Put it back."  
  
"But-"  
  
"Beth!" she scolded, reaching for the jar to put it back up on the shelf. Beth tried to relinquish it too quickly, and Quinn had no sooner felt the smooth glass jar slip past her fingers than she heard a loud crash and looked down to see a mess of glass and thick red sauce splattered up to Beth's waist and her own knees.  
  
She didn't bother looking up; she could hear the reactions around her.  
  
The tears came hard and fast - not over the sauce, that was easily paid for and there were dozens of jars, not because she had no idea what to feed Beth because it was so late and she was so  _tired_ , not even really for the women around her - she had never cared as much what they thought, it was just-...she couldn't anymore. She  _couldn't_. She couldn't do any of it:not the errands, not the dinner, not going back to the office in the morning to see if she had a job...  
  
She knew she should go pay for the jar she had broken, but she couldn't face the cashier looking like this. Digging into her purse, she produced a dollar and set it on the display of jars - the cost, plus to the stock boy for his trouble cleaning it all up. She pulled Beth by the wrist out from the mess and toward the exit, trying in vain to ignore the comments and questions and stares that followed them.  
  
Why had she thought she could do this? Be a mother like her own, be half as good as Katie, be appreciated at her job for what she did and not-...and do all of it on her own, by herself? She had wanted so desperately to prove she didn't need to depend on a man - or anyone - then be able to build herself up and find a man who respected her when the time was right. But they would only ever see an easy girl anyway, and she needed a way to pay for things after being fired for slapping her boss, and her daughter was such a  _mess_ -  
  
She couldn't do any of this anymore. And she had promised she wouldn't leave, even if she had somewhere to put Beth, and-  
  
She needed help.   
  
Quinn spied a phone booth at the end of the sidewalk and made a beeline, Beth following behind. She stepped inside, tugging the girl in with her to keep her from getting even more wet, and half-closed the door. With trembling, desperate fingers she fished a dime out of her purse, then froze as it occurred to her that she had no idea who to call.  
  
Her first instinct was Katie - afte rall, she was raising kids successfully and without getting spaghetti sauce or mud all over everything, but what would she say? She wasn't going to admit failure to the woman who had given up and left because raising Beth was hard and she cared too much about what people thought. Besides superficial household tips and maybe the waffle thing, Quinn couldn't think of a single constructive thing her big sister might be able to contribute - just a lot of hypocritical judgments.  
  
She wished she could call her mother. She knew she was too old to admit it, but she wanted her  _mom_ , the woman who had raised her...there was plenty of food at her parents' house, she was sure, and it was so big and warm and homey and smelled amazing - the combination of her mother's gardenia perfume, her father's leather briefcase, the roast in the oven...She could live there while she looked for another job, she bet-  
  
But her parents wouldn't let them stay, she realized, hand stilling on the receiver. They had sent her away as soon as they found out she was pregnant because telling their friends they had sent their daughter to boarding school until the "racial troubles" were over was a lot easier than acknowledging that their perfect daughter had made a mistake. Where did she think Katie had learned to be so obsessed with keeping up appearances? If a pregnant teenager had been too difficult ot explain, then an unemployed 22-yeaer-old with a 4-year-old black-headed daughter would be impossible.  
  
She didn't know where they would send Beth this time, but she had no doubt they would. Just as they shoved aside any bad feeling, anything scary, they wouldn't hesitate to shove her daughter back into the shadows.  
  
She held Beth closer, biting her lip as she realized that, with family out of the picture, she had exactly two options left...and a decision to make.  
  
Finn wasn't the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but he was loyal and trusting, making him the obvious choice. He would understand it wasn't her fault for leaving without saying goodbye...and she was sure he had a job by now, something stable, reliable, probably at his stepfather's tire shop or something.  
  
Maybe she didn't want to marry him - which he would insist on for all the polite but wrong reasons. And maybe the thought of going back to Lima made her feel like an absolute failure; she had only worked as hard as possible to get out of that place and stay out...but without a job did she really have anything tying her to Columbus?  
  
She closed her eyes, trying to steel her nerves and gather the strength to walk back to everything she had run away from. Mothers made sacrifices for their children, she reminded herself. Finn would take good care of Beth - and her - and everything would be okay as long as he didn't ask too many questions about why his daughter looked so much like his best friend...  
  
She sighed - or was it sobbed? - and let her head fall back against the glass, leaning heavily against the wall of the booth as she held Beth closer. She couldn't keep lying about who her daughter was. All it did was ache and create a hole insider her that never healed...and she wasn't sure it was fair to do that to Finn, too. Lying to him when she was 17, when she was young and terrified, was one thing, but on the list of mistakes she had made that year it wasn't in the top 10. But to repeat the same mistake now  _knowing_  it was wrong but trying to make things easier? What was that teaching her daughter except to push aside any scary truths just like her own family had done her whole life?  
  
She couldn't call Finn and turn into everything she had never wanted to be. But the alternative...  
  
What help could Puck possibly be? She doubted he had any kind of job, probably just sat around watching tv - or for all she knew, he was a wino under a bridge somewhere, or trying ot be the next Elvis. She could guarantee he had even less of an idea how to take care of a child than she did.  
  
But she needed help, and he was who was left.  
  
With trembvling fingers, she dropped a dime into the slot and cradled the receiver against her shoulder as she dialed, surprised she remembered the number after all the time. His mother answered, and Quinn tried to find words but they had all gone, leaving only a dry throat and more tears.  
  
"Hello?" she asked again. She wouldn't have any idea who she was- Quinn was pretty sure she had met Puck's mother once in passing at a football game, but they hadn't been like that. What was she supposed to say to her - let alone to  _him_? "Hello?"  
  
Knowing her last chance was on the horizon, she finally managed to whisper, "Mrs. Puckerman, is Noah home?" His given name felt foreign on her lips.  
  
"Who is this?" she asked, and though Quinn couldn't see the woman she could imagine her eyebrows knitted together from the tone of her voice. This wasn't a good sign.  
  
"I'm...an old friend." It seemed simplest.  
  
"Well, 'old friend,' he doesn't live here anymore. Hasn't for awhile."  
  
Quinn didn't know why she was so surprised - it had been five years. She had more dimes, so maybe- "Could you tell me where he is now?" she ventured.  
  
His mother gave a derisive snort. "I can give you his address, but good luck getting in touch with him. Boy goes off to a war zone and can't even be bothered to write his mother. But it's okay - if he were dead, I'm sure the Marines would tell me, so no need to let the woman who gave birth to him know he's alive."  
  
Quinn sank down further against the phone booth as she prattled on passive-aggressively. Her last hope for help was in a jungle halfway around the world and might very well never come back - if he did, it certainly wouldn't be tonight. She managed to mumble an exhausted, "Thank you" and nudge the phone back into its cradle before dissolving into tears again.  
  
No help was coming. There was no prince to rescue her, no one to lean on. Just her - and the little girl staring at her uneasily, clearly not sure why her mother was such a wreck.  
  
She was just going to have to figure it out on her own.


	5. Chapter 5

By the time the alarm went off at 7, Quinn had a plan. She hadn't gotten to sleep until what felt like only an hour before but was in reality closer to four hours. Her eyes were overly dry, the by product of so much crying the night before, and she had what might have been the worst headache of her life. Her back was sore and there was no cleaning her previous day's stockings.  
  
But she had a plan.   
  
Well, the start of one anyway. Maybe more of a mindset than a specific plan. But considering how little she'd had the night before - and how long she had stayed up before coming up with it - she would take whatever fragment of strategy she could.  
  
She slipped out of bed and shrugged into her robe, padding into the living room. Beth was asleep, though she seemed like she might be starting to stir, and Quinn didn't try to keep quiet in the hopes that it would rouse her. She rustled through Beth's clothes before coming up with part one of the plan:  
  
A yellow cardigan and a pair of jeans.  
  
The sweater was one Beth liked - probably because it was soft and not frilly. The jeans usually sat with the playclothes (step 36 of the plan was to buy some bedroom furniture, assuming step 5 of retaining her job worked), but Quinn didn't care. There was absolutely no reason the girl should have to wear dresses and tights for daycare, even if all the other little girls did. The women there would think she was crazy - and maybe she was. Maybe they both were.  
  
But if not all women were mothers, and not all mothers stayed home, and not all mothers had any need to become wives...she had a really hard time figuring out why little girls stlll had to behave like it was 1900. If girls could wear pants and boys wore jeans when they weren't doing dirty work, there was no  _real_  reason not to let her daughter just wear playclothes. They would hold up better and be easier to wash anyway.  
  
It seemed like most of the time they spent together consisted of Beth trying methodically - and ploddingly - to do everything "right"and getting frustrated that she never managed it, while Quinn tried not to snap at her for taking so long. And of course manners were important in their time and place, but expending so much energy - and time - on social graces that were hallmarks of a world Quinn wanted nothing to do with seemed pointless.  
  
It wasn't surprising that Katie had drilled them in so hard - not the way her sister clung to social rules and mores and cared so deeply about what certain people might think. She probably tried even harder because Beth was so obviously different. But Quinn didn't care; the amount of pretending required in order to appear acceptable was exhausting and, frankly, not worth it.  
  
She was different.  _They_  were different. And life would probably be just as difficult but a lot less frustrating if they stopped fighting it so hard. Starting with play clothes.  
  
Beth opened her eyes and looked up at her blearily. Quinn wasn't sure if the girl was actually trying to read whether the meltdown from the previous night had passed, but she wouldn't have blamed her. On that front she was certainly not following in her own mother's footsteps; she couldn't remember seeing the woman look anything less than perfect and composed. To Beth's credit, she hadn't asked any questions or said much at all after they left the store, for which Quinn was grateful. She hadn't wanted to try to explain why everything was falling apart to a child too young to go to school while at the same time trying desperately to reassure her that her promise not to leave was sincere and unbreakable. But now that she had a plan, Quinn could simply offer a tired but genuine smile and chirp, "Good morning."  
  
"Morning," Beth mumbled in reply, blinking a few times.  
  
"We're doing things a little differently this morning, but I think it'll be faster for us." She could see an anxious look start on Beth's face, and Quinn's heart ached. The girl was just as frustrated with how long things took as she was - and was worried about how frustrated Quinn could be over it. In an effort to distract her daughter and reassure her that there wouldn't be yelling, she held up the clothes as a peace offering. "Get dressed first, okay?"   
  
Beth sat up, eyeing the clothes suspiciously. Quinn knew there wasn't much she could point to on Beth that looked like her, but the skeptical expression looked so familiar...she smiled faintly to herself. "Those?" Beth asked, pointing to the jeans.  
  
Quinn nodded. "They'll be easier to run around in - and a lot harder to mess up."  
  
The smile started tiny, as though Beth was almost afraid to believe it was real, then grew into a beaming grin. "Really?" she asked, still half-convinced it had to be a trap.  
  
Quinn nodded, smiling. The women at the daycare wouldn't be thrilled, but she didn't care; the look on her daughter's face was worth it. Such a simple thing- she couldn't imagine why people couldn't just let things like a dress go if something this easy would make a little girl so happy. There would be plenty of times Beth should wear something nicer - restaurants she would ease her daughter into when she was a little older, maybe, and church on Sunday, and her parents' formal Christmas party. But having one less thing to worry about while Beth was jumping out of trees and sliding down muddy hills seemed like good common sense. "Yep. And I thought this sweater would be nice."  
  
Beth nodded, dark eyes sparkling. "Uh-huh. It's my favourite."  
  
Quinn grinned. For all she felt like there was practically no time to spend with Beth, at least she had picked up a few things. She bet Katie couldn't identify Beth's favourite sweater - and sure, in the grand scheme of things, that wasn't as important as knowing her favourite toy or book or foods, but it was something. A tiny piece of motherhood she was better at than her sister.  
  
And she was absolutely certain her sister had never made Beth smile this hard. So her plan had to be doing  _some_  good.  
  
"Put these on and I'll make breakfast," Quinn instructed, handing the clothes over. Breakfast was part two of the plan - quicker than French toast, easier than waffles, and much neater to eat than sausage links or pancakes with all their syrupy mess. There was nothing wrong with cereal - nothing at all. And since there was no real  _wrong_  way to eat it, she had to believe it would go faster than anything that involved a knife and fork.  
  
At least she hoped so.  
  
She left the spoon beside the bowl and went to get ready herself - Beth might not have been a cultured young lady, but she could usually be trusted to dress herself and at least start eating.   
  
Besides, she had to begin part 3.  
  
Quinn started with the makeup: undereye circles covered, perfectly-applied blush, dab of lipstick. She had considered going with something darker, bolder for her lips or maybe with a strong eyeliner, something to command attention, but the goal wasn't to look more like Marcia. Not really anyway. The point was to not need to.  
  
Back in high school she had been the picture of social strength, ruling the hallways, certain there was nothing and no one who could touch her power. She didn't need to be that person again - that shallow, status-obsessed, willfully-naive person - but she did need to tap into that confidence. She had learned too late that the confidence was almost entirely a byproduct of her cheerleading uniform - when school didn't start again and the uniform was gone, so was everything that came with it. But if she could envision that strength and power again it would help immensely with steps 4 and 5.  
  
She tucked her hair back the best she could - it was so much shorter now than when she was young, but there was something powerful about her hair being up off her face, pinned up and sleek. It was nothing like the ponytail she had been familiar with, but the makeshift french twist worked well enough even if it did take half the bobby pins in her cabinet.  
  
Quinn looked in the mirror and blinked at the familiar yet foreign young woman staring back at her. This wasn't who she wanted to be...but if she knew, if she was conscious of using it just as a tool to feign confidence instead of thinking she was really the envy of the world, maybe it wouldn't be so bad. The problem had come in when she hadn't known who else to be. She had other things now - other things to do, a daughter who depended on her, a plan to get her life on track...the scared girl in high school couldn't have separated the two, but now she could. At least she hoped.  
  
She pulled on her best red dress and jacket. Usually for work she favoured easier colours - pale yellow, blue, the occasional light emerald green - but at a time like this, she felt it was a good idea to pull on her best armor. Women who wore red - who  _wore_  it and didn't let it wear them - were much harder to mess with, and she could use all the extra confidence she could get today. Cross necklace fastened and black heels slipped on, she emerged from the bedroom, hoping against all logic that Beth would be almost ready. She doubted it, considering how things had gone every other morning Beth had been in her care, but maybe for once her plan would have worked out the way it was supposed to.  
  
Beth sat at the table in her sweater, jeans, and loafers she liked because they smeared less than dress shoes even if they did almost fly off her feet when she ran too quickly. Quinn approached, peering over the girl's shoulder to see her carefully scooping cornflakes out of the milk, the bowl almost empty except for the post-cereal milk soup and a few soggy flakes. "Almost done?" she asked, unable to keep the surprise out of her voice.  
  
Beth nodded, then glanced up at her. It was hard not to notice how much more relaxed the girl seemed...and Quinn doubted it was just because jeans were more comfortable than tights.  
  
She remembered her first year at Radcliffe and the sense of absolute freedom that followed her down every hall, across every lawn, around every bit of campus. Being around girls who talked about things, whose smiles were genuine...she hadn't been sure before whether a child was capable of such a sense of relief and freedom, but she had a feeling that smile gave her the answer.  
  
So at the absolute least, the parenting portion of her plan was right on the money. She hoped the rest might be half as successful.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Quinn had to admit that the horrified look on the day care attendant's face as Beth bounded out of the car in jeans and loafers, bushy ponytail swinging behind her, was so comically overwrought that it almost made the whole thing seem like an even better idea. Not that she delighted in making others uncomfortable, but the poor girl had seemed so stricken over a pair of perfectly good pants of all things - and watching her struggle to pull the corners of her mouth up into a tight smile of faux-politeness through clear contempt had brought Quinn an almost perverse glee.  
  
She was sure she would be given a judgmental, passive-aggressive talking-to about sending her daughter in inappropriate attire for a young lady, which was why finding a new daycare was Plan Item 10 - and it would be bumped up even higher if anyone tried to say anything to Beth about it. There were plenty of things she could abide with a forced smile if she had to, but she absolutely would not let some narrow-minded woman tell Beth there was something wrong with her for not buying into some post-war ideal of femininity.  
  
The knowledge of how horrified her mother and sister would be to know Beth was running and climbing trees dressed like that, with blessing and all, did add to her enjoyment. She knew it was petty, and contrary to what they might assume it had nothing to do with punishing them or giving up on being a good mother. But for the first time in a month, she finally felt like she had a handle on things.  
  
Now to get the same feeling at work.  
  
At 8:37, she couldn't guarantee anyone but the secretaries would be in the office, but she hoped her errand would prove fruitful before she had to report to her desk for the morning. Setting down her coat and bag, she pulled out the folder of resumes she had brought from home. If her own boss wasn't going to appreciate her work and insisted on thinking she was just another toy, she would find another boss who would treat her well.  
  
Or none of the men would hire her, they would all report her stunt back to Mr. NIchols, and he would have yet another basis on which to fire her.   
  
So really she had nothing left to lose. And on the off chance one of the men wasn't stuck too far up his own ass to recognize her skills and dedication, this could be the perfect way to ensure she stayed employed without having to constantly look over her shoulder for the man she had once respected.  
  
She would start with the ones who liked her, the ones she had done work for and helped out and traded favours with in the past. And with any luck, at least a few of them might be in already and receptive to her polite request for a job before the day started.  
  
She had no idea what to say if they asked why, but that would have to come later. She wasn't about to give anyone the real answer.  
  
The first three offices were a complete bust; not only were none of the bosses in yet, but she couldn't even tell from the girls out front whether Marcia had been spreading stories about last night. From their lack of reaction to her, Quinn assumed her nemesis hadn't been by yet - but she had no doubt it was only a matter of time.  
  
In the back corner, Quinn could see light coming from beneath the door in Jim's office. It was the sort of place they put people with important jobs whose personal politics or ambitions seemed a bit too odd to mix with the rest of the hierarchy of staff. In Jim's case, he had been there too long and stood in the way of too many up-and-coming nephews who wanted prime column inches about national politics. Plus his egalitarian views tended to create rumours that he was a communist, so really it was kind of a miracle he still had a job at all, but Quinn knew better. He was just a "golden rule" sort of man who thought treatment - good, bad, or otherwise - should be reciprocated. It wasn't his fault so many of the men three decades his junior thought they could treat him like he was a nonfactor. She didn't know much about the Soviets, but she was pretty sure that wasn't a very Stalin-friendly outlook.  
  
If anyone might accept her offer to help out for awhile, she certainly hoped he would be one of them.  
  
Drawing in a deep breath, she walked to his corner and knocked on the closed office door. "I've got them already, June, thank you," came the muffled response. She wasn't sure whether that meant he didn't want to be disturbed at all or just not for whatever particular purpose.  
  
Deciding to press her luck, Quinn opened the door slowly and asked, "I'm sorry to interrupt - do you have a moment?"  
  
Jim sat at his desk, half-hidden behind stacks of wire reports. He peered at her for a moment, then waved her in. "Sure. Quinn, right? I was just catching up before everyone came in. I suppose you're here to ask for more space for Metro? I don't know why no one else seems to care that my few pages have to cover the future of the whole country-" he stopped himself and offered an apologetic half-smile as though he realized it wasn't her fault and didn't want ot take it out on her. As the frequent messenger, she appreciated the courtesy, even if it was besides the point at hand. "Anyway. What can I do for you?"  
  
"I was just wondering whether you might need another secretary to help out. Either for the department or just you - I know you don't have a girl of your own and wasn't sure whether that was by choice or-"  
  
"A friend of yours needs a job?" he asked, raising an eyebrow.  
  
His eyes seemeed to peer right through her, practically holding her in place, and she knew there was no point in trying to make something up. The man had interviwed presidents - admittedly before any of them were president, they weren't the Washington Postor anything - and anyone who had gotten an answer from Calvin Coolidge had to be good at pulling information out of someone. "Not a friend actually," she admitted evenly. She wasn't going to provide any more detail than was absolutely necessary to get what she needed.  
  
"Oh?" He leaned forward, folded hands resting on the stack of reports, eyebrows arching toward where his hairline had once been.  
  
"Yes," she replied shortly. The last thing she needed was for the entire office to know why she needed to look for a new position, and while JIm didn't strike her as the type of gentleman who ever engaged in the office gossip mill, she didn't want to risk it. She wanted even less to risk looking weak in front of the man she was asking for a job - or like a girl who complained about things, beause they never got hired again - and if she started trying to explain...  
  
He stared at her for a long moment, but she didn't shift or waver. This was too important to let herself back down. After what felt like several minutes but was surely a lot less, he leaned back in his chair with a faint smirk of satisfaction, folded hands across his midsection. "How about if I do you one better?"  
  
Quinn studied him, trying to discern whether this was a trap. But if so, what kind? Unless he thought 'one better' included coming on to her too, she didn't think he could be sabotaging her any worse than her boss had done. And something about his body language seemed like...she didn't know exactly, but he certainly didn't look like he intended to threaten her. He wasn't sly or coy like a pseudo-ally, more like they were on the same team. Like they could pull one over on someone together - and she had to admit, she liked the sound of that. Offering a sly smile, she asked, "Oh?"  
  
Jim's grin widened a little, and he instructed, "Pull up a chair - let me find something." He turned to one of his four filing cabinets and tugged out an overstuffed drawer, rifling through with a clear sense of purpose. Quinn sat smoothly in the chair across from his and hoped that whatever he was looking for would help - or at least wouldn't hurt.  
  
* * * * *  
  
If there was a line on which smugness turned to giddy victory, Quinn found herself straddling it as she strode toward her desk. Her steps were sure, heels digging into the carpet, back straight, chin up, smirk creeping across her face even as she tried to keep it in check.   
  
The thick packet she held at her chest was everything - a gamble but also all the power she needed.  
  
And if it didn't work, Jim would take care of things. But it was going to work; it was too brilliant a plan not to.  
  
Quinn bypassed her desk and walked right into Nichol's office without knocking. As her boss looked up in surprise at the intrusion, she could feel her stomach tighten as the memories of the previous night came rushing back. She held her head higher, unwilling to give up even a portion of her dignity and power by letting him see how betrayed and hurt she felt.  
  
She hated the way she could feel old masks coming up, old suits of crimson armor covering her like they had back in Lima. But if she could use them for good..or at least as a show of strength against a potential enemy...then they could remain temporary - just tools in her arsenal instead of her standard operating mode.  
  
Besides, this time she wasn't just armed with a stiff jaw and a burning glare.  
  
"Quinn." His dismissive tone bothered her intensely, like she was just another person coming to pester him into doing something he didn't want to deal with. As though she were the problem.  
  
"Mr. Nichols," she replied coldly. Her fingers curled tighter around the papers in her arms, clutching them like a talisman to give her strength.  
  
Feigning strength, authority, power - that was easy. That just required a position, a uniform, a title, plus maybe a disdainful gaze and sneer to go with it. Believing in it, actually  _feeling_  it, was another matter entirely.  
  
There was a long silence as he seemed to wait for her to...She wasn't sure what. To demand answers, maybe. To cry. To grovel for her job and apologize for being too irresistible and tempting him like that. Not that all of those hadn't occurred to her, but she knew the first would be fruitless - he couldn't give her an answer that would possibly make her understand why - and the rest were beneath her. Finally Mr. Nichols began. "Look, I'm not sure what you're planning on saying about yesterday, but I think it's in both our interests to drop it."  
  
Of course it was best for  _him_  if they dropped it, she thought bitterly. He had a wife and kids. It shouldn't have needed to be in her best interest to stay quiet - she wasn't the one who had done anything wrong - but they both knew what happened to girls who made trouble That was a battle she would have to fight another day, once she was out of the hot seat and once again had the luxury to be angry over something so systemic. Still, she had to almost laugh at how perfectly he had walked into what Jim had given her to say, practically working off the perfect script. "I agree,"she replied. If he could walk just a bit further, get himself in just a little deeper...  
  
"I would hate to have a problem on my hands. You understand. A distraction from work."  
  
She knew what that was code for, and though any other time she would have been outraged at being called a 'distraction,' a 'problem,' she couldn't help but smile faintly because she knew what was coming next.   
  
There was an art to Jim's strategy, a delicate dance: come on too strong and her boss would bolt; too weak and she'd lose the upper hand. In either case, she'd be out of a job. Still, now felt like the right time to start playing her own cards. "Of course," she replied politely with her best 'company' smile, one carefully honed over years of family dinners and church activities. "I'm sure you wouldn't like the office to find out any more than I would like to be out of a job."  
  
He looked up quickly, and for a moment she was worried she'd spooked him, but he relaxed after a moment. "Exactly," He replied, smiling as though they had an understand. "I knew you'd see reason. You're not the kind of girl who goes around making trouble."  
  
Had that been why? He knew she wouldn't say anything because of her daughter? Seething but covering it with a sharp-tongued grin, she replied, "Not unless someone makes trouble for me first." The papers in her arms hit her boss's desk with a satisfying, heavy thud, and for a moment he looked up at her like she had lost her mind. When her gaze met his and didn't pull away, he broke first and looked down to see what she had slammed down. The cover was legalistically innocuous, its impact buried somewhere deep inside the hundred-page-or-so booklet. Even the title - H.R. 7512 - didn't give much clue as to the contents. "What's this?"  
  
"The Civil Rights Act," she replied evenly.  
  
His brow furrowed as he leaned in to study the cover, blinking twice as though he thought he must be missing something. "What does any of this have to do with discrimination against negroes-"  
  
"And women," she added pointedly. She had already graduated by the time the bill had been amended to include sex in an effort to sink its passage, and she had wanted so badly to be back at school to talk about its implications...and why people thought it would be less popular to support women than negroes considering even southern segregationists had wives and daughters.  
  
Nichols' brow knitted tighter. "Yes, but I'm not- I mean sure, but they didn't-" he stammered.  
  
Perfect - he was as clueless and lost as she had hoped. The next step required as much. "In particular, women whose bosses dispose of them like playthings."  
  
It was a bluff and a big one - the law didn't say anything like that. It didn't say much of anything at all about women, actually, aside from a blanket prohibition against discrimination or mistreatment on the basis of sex. And unlike protections based on race, Congress hadn't even debated the issue so there wasn't much of a legislative record to look to when figuring out what they were concerned with banning for the protection of women.   
  
But it  _might_  mean that, Jim told her. It might  _say_  that, even - lawyers were working on proving it said exactly that. Being fired because the boss wanted his girl to sleep with him sounded to Quinn like the definition of "because of sex," but she knew just enough about laws to suspect it wasn't that simple.   
  
From the perplexed panic on her boss's face, she had a feeling he wasn't up to speed on much at all about the new law. "I didn't-"  
  
"You did," she replied evenly.  
  
"I didn't do anything wrong."  
  
"You did," Quinn repeated, tone wavering just a bit but not enough to even consider backing down. She wouldn't always have believed it was such a bad thing he had done. There was a time she would have found it flattering that her boss looked at her that way and she would have chased that good feeling all over town with him until he discarded her. If she hadn't gone to college-...no, she corrected herself; if she hadn't had Beth. If not for Beth and all the hell that year had been, she would have paired off with any handsome, well-bred Harvard boy who would have her and never believed there was anything wrong with parading her around town like a trophy...or with treating her like his dirty little secret...or with anything else that gave her the intensely warm feeling of a man finding her desirable. She would been living the New England version of Katie's life by now with no idea why she was so miserable...that is, assuming any man would have had an interest in keeping her around after she gave him everything. No doubt Mr. Nichols wouldn't have. "And if you can't see that for yourself, let the law serve as a guide for what isn't okay. Because if you don't...I'll make sure you do."  
  
His eyes widened quickly at her threat. "You wouldn't do that," he stated, but the worry in his voice betrayed his lack of confidence. "You're not a girl who makes trouble..." He tried to assert his authority again, eyes burrowing into her for a moment, but her unwavering, unafraid stare pinned him back in his chair.  
  
"You shouldn't assume so much," she stated cooly as she stepped to the door. Her point made, she let herself get cocky for a moment - pausing with her hand on the doorknob, she added with a broad, disingenuous smile, "How is your lovely wife, by the way? I haven't seen her in awhile - I'm sure we have plenty to catch up on."  
  
She didn't need to look at the man behind the desk for his reaction; the sharp inhale told her all she needed to know.  
  
Her legs were almost jelly by the time she sank into her chair, dumbstruck by her own actions. She had done it. It had  _worked._  Oh God, had she really just practically blackmailed her boss? It was the sort of thing she would have tried at 16, when her overconfidence and sense of social entitlement drove her to any lengths to preserve her standing at school. She was supposed to know better now than she had back then- If anyone found out, she would be gone for sure and then-  
  
...She would just have to take "then" as it came, wouldn't she?  
  
What she had done wasn't so unlike what America was doing with the Soviets anyway - mutually assured destruction was the only thing stopping either country from bombing one another. So while she couldn't file a complaint and get Mr. Nichols in trouble unless he wanted the entire office to know, he couldn't try to get rid of her because then she could tell anyone she wanted. It was just the smaller-scale version of the Cuban Missile Crisis; everything was just strategy.  
  
And, just like wearing her armor, there was nothing wrong with being strategic. It didn't mean she was transforming back into a person she was ashamed of ever having been, just that she was learning to be smarter about how she attacked problems in front of her. It was about application - using the skills she had for a noble - or at least fruitful - purpose rather than to serve her own vanity.  
  
She still had her job; that felt pretty fruitful to her.  
  
And the look on his  _face_...she couldn't help but grin, almost giddy from the adrenaline of it. Her boss - a grown man - had been scared of her...of the power she held. No man leering at her breasts could ever compare to that.  
  
Marcia walked past, a smirk crossing her face as she neared Quinn's desk. "Good morning," she said in a too-cheery voice, a fake and overly-bright smile only making it even clearer just how disingenuous the sentiment was. "How was your evening? You look a little tired - did you have big plans?"  
  
Five weeks ago, she would have rolled her eyes and gotten to work, head down, letting the girls gossip no matter how much it bothered her and how much it made her life at work more difficult whether the men wanted to admit they listened to the office chatter or not. Five years ago, she would have single-handedly started a scorched-earth campaign to take down Marcia and her pathetic band of followers just like she had done with Sandy Lopez, not stopping until her own position was the only one worth having.  
  
Now, Quinn found middle ground. "I'm sure my night was less exhausting than yours. How is our illustrious editor?" Her own smile was as disingenuous as Marcia's, bright and dripping with venom, but if Marcia was surprised or taken aback she didn't dare let it show.  
  
"I don't know what you're talking about."  
  
"Oh, I'm sure you do," Quinn replied, her tone upbeat even as their gazes burned into one another, challenging.  
  
There was tense silence for a moment, and Quinn almost worried she had misjudged her adversary. But Marcia spoke first, her tone chipper and polite with clear loathing bubbling just beneath the surface, tension pulling her smile too hard. "Well, I should leave you to your work - I need to go type these." Her eyes flashed in rage once more before she retreated.  
  
Quinn sat a little taller at her desk. She had a feeling this might be the start of her own Cold War, but there worse things - like a hot war. At least she had a feeling Marcia would be leaving her alone for awhile now that she had made clear she couldn't be messed with.  
  
Smiling to herself, Quinn settled in to start her tasks for the day. With any luck she would be able to take a long lunch so she could call around for a new daycare, because she could practically guarantee there would be a call mid-afternoon about something Beth had done, and she wanted to be able to tell them exactly what she thought of them. It would help if she could leave on time, too - there was grocery shopping to do: frozen dinners, a few casseroles she could bake over the weekend and reheat quickly during the week...and the ingredients for pancakes. She liked those better than waffles anyway.


End file.
